The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Well, I can see what might be lurking in the original to make this a minor classic, but I found myself repeatedly blown off course with irritation at the awful McKendrick translation. All forgein language novels need a fluid translation, but this is a book in many ways about an enchanted parallel universe, so it is particularly important than one should be able to enter it and live it with conviction. I found this quite impossible, however, because the translator's English prose is clumsy, stilted, wooden, unnatural, obstacle-strewn. It reads like a very literal, A-level standard translation, with no attempt at naturalism in English. Here is an example, chosen at random (it's easy to do so; open any page), describing an argument about politics:
"I submitted to him and smiled, occasionally rebelling, but more often not, overcome despite myself by his candour and sincerity, a bit crude and relentless without doubt - I'd tell myself - but in the end truly compassionate because essentially egalitarian and fraternal." Dreadful, isn't it ? It's like wading through treacle, only without the consistency.
Maybe this style is entirely deliberate. Maybe it is supposed to be scrupulously true to the original. Whatever the cause (and I would be genuinely interested to know), the effect for me was sadly to make this unusual book almost unreadable; all fluidity is lost. Even reading it on holiday not far from Ferrara (where it's set), with all the time in the world on my hands, it was with real reluctance that I would return to it. I knew very well that the way would be strewn with McKendrick's linguistic boulders, his looming thickets of awkward prose.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe that this renowned Italian novelist has been well served by this particular translator.
I suggest that readers try another one.

This is a novel about the holocaust that barely mentions the holocaust. The setting is Ferrara immediately before the Second World War, and the main characters are Jewish Italians. We are told their fate in the opening pages: most of them will be deported to German concentration camps in 1943. They are young and daft and brave and confused and hopeful and all the things that human beings typically are, but unknown to them, the death ovens are waiting to swallow them up. The force of the work depends on our own knowledge of what happens next: its horror is all the more powerful for the death-knell being almost silent.

For example, one of the characters dies unexpectedly young: he contracts a lung disease and dies at what, in normal circumstances, would be considered a tragically young age, after several months of agony. But his ailment is only hinted at in the text: he appears here mostly as a cheerful mixture of diffidence and confidence, arguing with his left-wing factory-worker friend about the nature of justice and privilege. In an ordinary world, such a death would be a terrible and senseless loss, but here his lymphogranuloma saves him from the death camps. A few months after they have buried him, his family are deported to Germany "and no one knows whether they have any graves at all".

Jamie McKendrick's translation is excellent. Other reviewers have complained about the ponderous style, but the slow batting backwards and forwards of trivial concerns - like the endless tennis games that the characters play - is precisely what makes this novel so compelling. And McKendrick's lively version brings a freshness and immediacy to these 1930s Italians, who "skive" and "slope off" even as they fall in and out of love with each other and (somewhere in the background) worry about the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. The reader's hindsight and imagination does the rest of the work.

The novel brings to mind two other works. One is "People on Sunday", the silent film co-scripted by Billy Wilder, which shows working class youngsters relaxing at the weekend during a hot summer in Berlin in the late 1920s. What gives that film a power it could not have expected is our own knowledge of what happens next in Berlin, for the Nazis are about to destroy these ordinary people and their carefree weekends. Bassani's novel achieves the same effect, but this time on purpose. This is a post-war novel about ordinary life in pre-war Italy, but the horrors of the war itself are all the more real for their hardly being mentioned.

The second thing the Finzi-Continis reminded me of is a Gary Larson cartoon. The bombs have fallen, a city is burning, and people are running for their lives. A terrified family is driving frantically away from the devastation. On the back seat is a dog wagging its tail; the dog has noticed another dog on the pavement. Larson's caption reads something like: "Suddenly Ginger noticed something that attracted his attention."

That's a joke, but like all the best jokes there's a lot of truth in it. Most of us ignore the nightmare all around us because what really catches our eye is that other dog on the sidewalk. While the Nazis are planning their psychopathic destruction of millions of people, what their soon-to-be victims themselves are concerned with is silly and trivial, because that's what human life is like. And Giorgio Bassani celebrates that life here.

Beautifully written. The pace lulls the reader into a an easy sense of timelessness and yet time is fast running out for the characters.

I would highly recommend this book.

I would have preferred the Italian words and phrases to have been followed by a translation.