The garden of Finzi-Contini

"Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists." -"The Guardian" "Curiously haunting and poetic . . . Like Proust, a novelist to whom he is inevitably compared, Bassani is a specialist in decadence and nostalgia." -"Christian Science Monitor" "Bassani looms large in the Italian literary scene . . . ["The Garden of the Finzi-Continis"] is an honest book, and tells with a kind of probing tenderness a true story of sensitive and vulnerable youth in a somber decade." -"Saturday Review" ""The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" is first and foremost a love story and on quite a different level from anything else Bassani wrote . . . Beneath every other theme and concern, and whether or not prompted by the political situation, the question [the novel] quite explicitly ask[s] is: what does it mean to have lived?" -from the new Introduction by Tim Parks

This story takes place largely in the garden of a wealthy Jewish family in Ferrara where young Jews meet to play tennis after being forced out of the local club by Fascists. The garden becomes an island of civilization in a brutal world.