Imprint: Penguin Classics
Published: 16/10/2018
ISBN: 9780141192185
Length: 848 Pages
Dimensions: 197mm x 53mm x 127mm
Weight: 870g
RRP: £25.00
Bassani's six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be.
Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani's six classic books, fully revised as a single volume by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron and The Smell of Hay. These interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters, memorializing not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs.
'Exquisite . . . from his boyhood Ferrara and the families he knew, Bassani has carved out a corner of Italy that rises above regionalism with fiction that can stand alongside the most lingering written in Europe to day' The New York Times
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Published: 16/10/2018
ISBN: 9780141192185
Length: 848 Pages
Dimensions: 197mm x 53mm x 127mm
Weight: 870g
RRP: £25.00
Essential reading for anyone thirsting for an understanding of the complex density of Europe's multicultural inheritance
Bassani, in these cultivated worldly-wise stories, so steeped in tenderness, rage and loss, is like someone returned from the underworld to bear witness
Exquisite . . . from his boyhood Ferrara and the families he knew, Bassani has carved out a corner of Italy that rises above regionalism with fiction that can stand alongside the most lingering written in Europe to day
Bassani is one of the great novelists of the last century ... It is time, long overdue, for Bassani's six-volume masterwork to appear in [English] in the shape and form, and with all the revisions, he chose for its appearance as a complete novel...The city and its people are immortalized in its luminous pages
Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity
No one else writes about time like this. Bassani is deeply unsettling and yet a joy to read