Deze epische saga duikt in het hart van Ferrara, een stad die rijk is aan kunst, geschiedenis en politieke intriges. Het volgt de verweven lotgevallen van verschillende families door de eeuwen heen, waarbij hun persoonlijke strijd wordt verweven tegen de achtergrond van belangrijke historische gebeurtenissen. U zult een rijk tapijt van menselijke relaties, ambitie en liefde ontdekken tegen de achtergrond van de levendige Italiaanse Renaissance. Het is een meeslepende verkenning van het leven binnen een van de meest invloedrijke stadstaten uit de geschiedenis.
A young working class woman abandoned by her bourgeois lover; the tensions of intermarriage between established classes and communities; a holocaust survivor seemingly back from the dead; a formidable socialist activist defying house arrest; the only surviving witness to the first local atrocity of the Second World War.
Into the insular town of 1930s Ferrara, a new doctor arrives. Fadigati is hopeful and modern, and more than anything wants to fit into his new home. But his fresh, appealing appearance soon crumbles when the townsfolk discover his homosexuality, and the young man he pays to be his lover humiliates him publicly.
A great commercial success when first published--and an Academy Award-winning film in 1970--Giorgio Bassani's wrenching story of Ferrara, Italy, and the aristocratic Finzi-Contini family during the dangerous days of the Fascist regime has become a modern classic. As a middle-class Jew, the narrator of the novel has contact with the detached Alberto and Micol Finzi-Contini only when they come to school to sit for final exams, and at the synagogue during the major holy days. For the most part, the Finzi-Continis remain isolated from the rest of the town behind the walls of their elegant estate. When Mussolini issues the anti-Semitic edicts of 1938, the narrator is expelled from the tennis club, and it is then that he is invited to play in the private courts beyond the Finzi-Contini garden. As the nightmare of the Holocaust descends upon this tranquil world, all are forced from its serenity and insularity. Giorgio Bassani, who was imprisoned until the Allies liberated Italy, won worldwide acclaim and numerous prestigious prizes for his novels and poetry.
'It was useless to think I'd ever be able to throw open the door behind which I was yet again hiding ... Not now. Not ever.' School is a place of unspoken hierarchies and rivalries for a young teenage boy growing up in the provincial town of Ferrara. But as the everyday classroom and playground dramas are played out, they begin to reflect the disturbing undertones of 1930s Italy, and the narrator realizes that being Jewish means he will always be excluded. The fourth book in Bassani's Romanzo di Ferrara cycle, Behind the Door is a luminous portrayal of childhood friendship and the loss of innocence. A new translation by Jamie McKendrick 'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian 'Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity' Ali Smith
'Exquisite. . . a classic tour de force' The New York Times 'It struggled to keep itself aloft, to gain height. But then it suddenly gave up, and dropped as though it were breaking into many pieces' Early on a cold Sunday morning, forty-five-year-old Edgardo Limentani gets up to join a shooting party in the countryside surrounding the town of Ferrara. As the day passes, he contemplates his past, his disappointments and how he has got here. Like the birds he shoots, he realizes, he is trapped, broken, waiting alone for the final coup de grâce. Then he sees a way out. The fifth book in Bassani's Novel of Ferrara sequence, and his final novel, The Heron is a taut, poignant portrait of a middle-aged man's reckoning with his life.
A collection of short stories that evokes isolated lives and a lost world in stories that are set in the Jewish-Italian community of 1930s Ferrara.