Far From Brooklyn

Reader’s log, December 2024

I started 2024 with a vague intention of finishing any book I began—that is, to be a more patient, thoughtful and intentional reader. I ended the year in a blur of books sampled and set aside unfinished—the exact same impatient, free-wheeling reader I’ve always been. 

I picked up and discarded three or four different books in the first week or two of December. But then I opened “The Novel of Ferrara,” by the late Italian writer Giorgio Bassani.

I’m still working my way through this epic work, a collection of six books that take place in Bassani’s hometown of Ferrara, a smallish city ever in the shadows of the better known metropolises of Bologna, Milan and Venice. Thus far I have read the first three books in the volume: a collection of short stories, “Within the Walls,” and his two best-known works, “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” a gorgeous novel about a wealthy, graceful, doomed family in the years leading up to the Holocaust, and a novella, “The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles,” a sad and remarkably straightforward portrait of a gay man essentially coming out in the 1920s.

As I read Bassani’s stories and novels, I felt the presence of Proust, of Waugh, of I.B. Singer: Proust, because Bassani’s work is inherently elegiac, recalling with crystalline detail the world of Ferrara the 1920s and 1930s, thirty or more years after the fact; Waugh, because of Bassani’s careful attention, especially in “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” to the intricacies of wealth and social hierarchies; and Singer because, like “The Family Moskat” and other works, Bassani is writing about a lost world—a society, specifically Ferrara’s small Jewish population in the years leading up to World War II, that we know to be doomed.

For all the echoes of those great writers and others, Bassani stands on his own as a truly distinct voice, in particular for the way he mixes history and fiction. But unlike others who have played at that game (for instance, E.L. Doctorow) Bassani focused not on world-historical figures but on the small world in which he grew up. Although the history is largely backdrop and not foreground, he was scrupulously careful about details of time and place. (This edition includes helpful footnotes that not only explain historical figures but also make note when Bassani purposely strayed from the historical record.) Even so, I found myself doing some background reading on 20th Century Italian history, sometimes just to check whether I was reading about an actual person or event or a fictional one!

A surprising companion to “The Novel of Ferrara” is Google Maps’ Street View. I regularly used it to look at streets, shopfronts, and historical points mentioned in the text. Ferrara, a Unesco Heritage sight, seems relatively little changed in the nearly 100 years since the time Bassani is describing, and readers can follow in the characters’ footsteps to see, for instance, the plaza on the outskirts of town where couples met on assignations, or the castle walls where newly re-empowered Fascists murdered 11 political opponents in 1943, or a plaque on the synagogue memorializing the more than 150 Jews deported from the city and murdered during the war. The tiny triangle of streets that enclosed Ferrara’s Jews in a ghetto for hundreds of years is there to be explored, virtually, at the click of a mouse.

The obsessive care taken to present Ferrara exactly as it existed in real life brings to mind another 20th Century literary giant: James Joyce. Like “Ulysses,” “The Novel of Ferrara” is meticulously true to its geography. I can’t think of another work so rooted in place. And just as visitors to Dublin track the doings of Leopold Bloom, so too can, and do, visitors to Ferrara use Bassani as a kind of guidebook to the city.

But the Ferrarese may be somewhat less enthusiastic about visitors tracing Bassani’s detailed descriptions of the city, because many of the historical details relate to the city’s abominable treatment of Jews. Although Ferrara was, in the Middle Ages, a relatively welcoming host to its Jewish population, by the early 17th Century the city’s Jews were confined to the ghetto. They didn’t regain their rights until 1859. By the 1920s, many of the local Jews, including Bassani’s relatively wealthy family, felt and behaved as much as Italians as Jews, but their hopes of true equality and enfranchisement were shattered as Italy imposed “race laws,” in part as a sop to Germany’s Nazis, but also in part because anti-semitism had deep historic roots. Many of the stories in “The Novel of Ferrara” center on the insecure position of Jews in the broader society; expressions of anti-semitism, whether minor or major, serve as periodic reminders that the Jews were still excluded and distrusted by their neighbors.    

Setting aside the historical and sociological aspects of Bassani’s work, the writing itself is wonderful. (Hat tip to the translator, Jamie McKendrick.) Bassani has a uniquely gentle, warm voice, nostalgic but not cloying. Even though the stories of Ferrara’s Jews are subtended by tragedy, Bassani’s tone is light, and at times even playful. Thanks to Bassani’s skillful writing, “The Novel of Ferrara” reads not as a dirge but as a symphony in a minor key.

I may have more to say once I have finished the remaining three books in the “hexology,” but if not I will simply say here that Bassani is a masterful writer and this is a work I would recommend to almost any serious and patient reader. 

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As for the books I began but did not finish this month, they were:

Operation Shylock by Philip Roth. Despite being a great admirer of Roth, I bypassed this book when it was published, having tired of his metafictional games. First there was Roth alter ego Peter Tarnopol, who gave way to Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, and then Roth started calling his alter ego Philip Roth, and you know what? I got bored with the enterprise. But in December, I read an amusing “year of reading” essay on The Millions by Tony Tulathimutte, who had made a project of reading all the Roth titles he hadn’t read before, and then ranked all the books first to worst. (I love a good ranking!)  Tulathimutte included “The Ghost Writer,” a Roth gem that is often overlooked, in his Top Five, so I figured he and I might have similar taste, at least as it relates to Philip Roth, so I picked up “Shylock” again because Tulathimutte liked it. But it just struck me as prolix and pointless.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. I’ve read a couple other titles by Yu and was impressed by his imagination and writing, but the format for this book is a TV script — a bad TV script. It’s meant to be a bad TV script. It’s supposed to be a commentary on racist Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotyping in general, but I couldn’t get past the fact that I was reading what was, intentionally, a bad TV script. Whenever the script format was jettisoned for backstory, my attention sharpened and my enjoyment increased, but the telescript format inevitably resumed at one point or another and after a while I just didn’t want to go on with it. (Fun factoid, though: I learned that the number four is bad luck in some Asian cultures, and the fourth floor is omitted in some buildings, just the way the 13th floor is skipped in many/most/all American buildings.)

Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Absolutely gorgeous writing. Highly sympathetic imagination. But I bogged down in the verbiage.

Photo credit: Via Mazzini, one the streets that bounded the Jewish ghetto of Ferrara, by user TRolvag, via Wikimedia Commons