Reader’s log, January 2025
Here it is, a new year, but some things never seem to change: I am still starting far more books than I finish, and my search for satisfying novels is rarely rewarded.
I began the month of January a bit more than halfway through the collected works of Georgio Bassani, which collectively make up what he called “The Novel of Ferrara.” I had read the first three volumes of the collection by the time the clock struck twelve on December 31. In January, I continued with Bassani, but the the last three volumes in the collection — two novellas and a set of writings that are mostly, but not all, short stories — fell far short of the first three. Maybe if I had taken a break and returned to Bassani after a few months or years I would have been more open to these latter creations, but I think not.
The novella “Behind the Door” is the best of the latter three. It’s the tale of a Jewish schoolboy coming to terms with the fact that, as a Jew, he will always be, at some level, an outsider in his own society, however Italian he may feel. The narrator’s sense of betrayal and otherness is somewhat affecting, but the beginning of the story is a seemingly endless recitation of the names and features of boys in his class, their pecking order as students, and their relationships with one another, none of which really is relevant to the core of the story itself. Bassani seemed to be setting up a huge canvas for a work that, in the end, only required a sketchbook.
The next work in the collection is the novella “The Heron,” which in many respects is an outlier among Bassani’s fiction: Unlike the vast majority of “The Novel of Ferrara,” it is set after World War II; alone among his novels and novellas it is told in the third person; and it is the least anchored in Ferrara itself. What really dooms this work is that it is a portrait of anomie, a study of a rich and frankly spoiled man who is trapped between his memories of fascism and suffering in the pre-war and war years, and who now fears that communism will rob him of his ancestral holdings. “The Heron” bears a fair resemblance to Lampedusa’s “The Leopard,” which similarly was a portrait of a wealthy man struggling to make peace with a changing world. Bassani was the editorial director of the company the published “The Leopard” so it seems more than a little likely that “The Heron” was inspired by “The Leopard” — a Ferrarese version of the Sicilian original.
The final volume of “The Novel of Ferrara” is a series of short stories, plus essays about the origins of the stories. Unlike the stories that open the collection, collectively titled “Within the Walls,” the later works (not only do they appear “later” in the collection but I assume they were composed later, as well) seem uniformly slight and overly self-referential. I found myself periodically looking away from the text and wondering why I was bothering to read this stuff. I kept at it simply out of respect for the author, whose other works had thrilled me so recently.
Long and short of it: Read the first three volumes of “The Novel of Ferrara.” The final three volumes are for completists only.
One byproduct of my reading of Bassani is a desire to read more Italian authors this year. I am in the midst of Natalia Ginzburg’s “Family Lexicon,” and I may read or revisit authors including Calvino, Moravia, Ferrante, Buzzati, and others, including, I imagine, Lampedusa..
After the anticlimax of completing Bassani’s “Novel of Ferrara,’ I straggled through an Eve Babitz novel, or maybe I would say “novel,” because it reads less like a novel than a series of magazine feuilletons. The tone is breezy and feckless, and many of the pieces, or chapters, as they are presented, are fun to read. Certainly Babitz has influenced generations of urban magazine writers. But the witty fecklessness palled after a while, and since there was essentially no narrative arc nor development of any characters, I set it aside.
I also read about two-thirds of Mary Gaitskill’s “Veronica,” yet another book that made the NYT’s “Best of the 21st Century” list, although it definitely would not make my own. It’s probably best to follow Gabrielle Zevin’s edict against criticizing books that one hasn’t finished, so I’ll just say that “Veronica” reminded me of Denis Johnson, the MFA-god whose appeal I’ve never understood.
In addition I gave Lydia Keasliing’s “Mobility” a shot. She’s clearly a very smart cookie but the book didn’t connect with me and, following Zevin’s advice again, I’ll leave it that.
Photo credit: The home of Giorgio Bassani, via Cisterna del Follo, Ferrara, Italy, via Wikimedia Commons
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