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Rating: ...in life, if one wants to truly understand how things are in this world, they must die at least once. And so, since this is the rule, it's better to die young, when one still has plenty of time ahead to pick themselves up and resurrect... (Giorgio Bassani - The Garden of the Finzi-Continis)
From the series "the great classics of Italian literature".
Few words, few fusses, Bassani's masterpiece kidnapped me for three or four days from my real life. A splendid detention, a golden prison that saddened me greatly to have to leave. Enclosed in the gigantic garden of the manor house of the Jewish-Ferrarese family of the Finzi-Continis, I followed step by step the evolution of the sexual attraction between the never-named protagonist and Micol Finzi-Contini during the infamous "racial laws" in the biennium '38/'39 on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland.
It's a small story, common to who knows how many, reconstructed from the author's memories, a microcosm of the Italian province clashing head-on with what was happening in Europe. An oasis of peace where the adventures of a few young people (the long afternoons spent on the tennis court, university studies in Venice and Bologna, freewheeling chats about politics, literature, poetry, and, I would say, art in general) are tied to the emotions and frustrations of a very ordinary love story where one is gently rejected by the other. The usual women, those who make you suffer, those from whom you have to "steal" a kiss to calm your raging testosterone, those who tell you "no, we can't break our beautiful friendship, our relationship can never have a future, et cetera et cetera...". But damn it anyway, well aware, however, that no one can dispose of other people's feelings.
It's a slice of youth life, the one that normally everyone has to face, it's a boundary line between the "classical" aristocratic and bourgeois world and the revolution that World War II will bring to Italian culture and the whole Western world. It's an idyllic snapshot in a historical frame made of blood and death, of fascist violence and stupidity, of deportations and Nazi camps. Bassani seems to want to give space to the past and nostalgia, the present is consumed in the moment, and the future is dark, made even darker by the approaching war tragedies on the horizon.
It's a "coming of age" novel where the protagonist experiences firsthand the explosive force of love, for better or worse, written in Bassani's wonderful prose, made of subordinate and counter-subordinate clauses, parentheses, and asides that fit perfectly within long passages appearing as perfect puzzles, to read and reread to appreciate the architecturally more complex passages.
It's a novel to read before you die. Luckily, I've only died a couple of times in my life, but if I must tell the truth, I still haven't truly understood how things are in this world. In fact, the more the years pass, the less I understand. Maybe the old folks are right to be senile, maybe it's just an armor to survive and carry on.
"Tiremm innanz!", as Amatore Sciesa said, having well understood that, sooner or later, a bullet in the chest will not be taken away by anyone.
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