Word: finzi
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...GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS, by Giorgio Bassani. The author was responsible for the posthumous publication of Lampedusa's The Leopard, and he has learned much from the master. Bassani's gracefully written novel depicts the elegant, decadent world of a rich Jewish family and its confrontation with Fascism and death...
...GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS, by Giorgio Bassani. The author was responsible for the posthumous publication of The Leopard, and he has learned much from the master. Bassani's gracefully written novel depicts the elegant, decadent world of a rich Jewish family and its confrontation with Fascism and death...
Burnished Symbols. In a way, death was what the Finzi-Continis had always wanted; and it is Author Bassani's subtle achievement to have described their lives with compassion but without sentimentality. His style is graceful, disciplined, direct. Occasional Italicisms will distract American readers, and few of the characters are drawn in detail. But Bassani's principal concern is with mood and meaning, and his leisurely, Proustian sentences brush and burnish a world of unexpected symbols. Although the novel is about Jews, it is only incidentally about Jewishness; the Finzi-Continis' confrontation with Fascism is employed...
Contemptuous Enclave. The Finzi-Continis are proud, pretentious, cultivated Jews, living in world-weary isolation behind the walls of their vast estate, which survives like a verdant enclave in the provincial city of Ferrara. Father Ermanno is an aging scholar-gentleman who has passed his life in obscure antiquarian studies, and who regards the Fascists with courtly contempt. Mother Olga is an aristocratic wraith who lives only to mourn the death of her six-year-old child. Son Alberto is a languid dilettante. Daughter Micol is a beautiful, spirited intellectual who cannot bring herself to escape the family...
...finding himself imprisoned in the moribund Eden that the Finzi-Continis have chosen to inhabit, he breaks off with Micol, begins to live a life on his own. A few years later, he witnesses the final destruction of the family: Alberto succumbs to a malignant disease; Micol and her parents are deported to Germany, presumably to die in the Nazis' gas chambers...