Giorgio Bassani

1 3 3 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W M A R T A F I G L E R O W I C Z As Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000) began writing in the late 1940s, Europe was reeling from World War II. Among those most confused and stricken by it were writers and artists, for whom the Nazis’ defeat and their gradually uncovered atrocities spelled an intellectual crisis. For many of them, those obsessed with strength, speed, and vitality, this crisis involved shame over a≈nities with fascism that now dishonored them. Soon after the Allied victory, Martin Heidegger was banned from teaching. Louis-Ferdinand de Celine was o≈cially declared a ‘‘national disgrace.’’ Ezra Pound was caged and then institutionalized. Staunchly antifascist authors were perhaps even more devastated in the war’s aftermath, in spite of their moral and political victory. Art’s capacity to heal postwar Europe, or even to persist within it, came under extreme doubt. ‘‘There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,’’ Theodor Adorno declared in 1949, as photographs from death camps trickled into America and Western Europe. Thomas Mann’s last finished novel, Doktor Faustus, deT h e N o v e l o f Fe r r a r a , b y G i o r g i o B a s s a n i , t r a n s l a t e d b y J a m i e M c K e n d r i c k ( N o r t o n , 8 0 0 p p . , $ 3 9 . 9 5 ) 1 3 4 F I G L E R O W I C Z Y scribed a modernist composer’s descent into madness and damnation . Hermann Broch’s last novel, written while he was in a concentration camp, reimagined the death of the Roman poet Virgil and the tradition that he represented. Amid this sense of dread, novelists of Bassani’s age tapped into their modernist forebears’ preoccupation with decadence. Bassani and his now-canonical contemporaries – Giuseppe di Lampedusa (whose Leopard Bassani himself rescued from oblivion), the Turkish writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, the exiled Soviet novelist and essayist Vasily Grossman, the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar – often sound like Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, or Italo Svevo. Like Proust’s and Svevo’s characters or Eliot’s speakers, their protagonists are androgynous , obsessive, and enervated. Their social life is plagued with embarrassment and failure. The men and women they love don’t want them, or aren’t good for them; they leave behind few works and no progeny. Modernity itself, as they chase after its promises, seems ever more like a sham. These postwar characters’ main di√erence from the earlier figures they echo lies in the vaguely comic, unheroic quality of their downward spirals. In Proust or Eliot, the specter of cultural collapse is omnipresent, but its aftermath remains unimaginable. The early period after World War II gives rise to narratives about people who have survived its great calamity, against long odds and without clear justification for why they had been spared from among a sea of casualties. Apparently unsinkable, they are cast into a world they are not sure they wanted to see, and which they can no longer trust will hold much value. Two decades later, in the late 1960s, this postwar ennui will be channeled into a more euphoric, playful relativism. For the time being, the pervasive mood of narrative fiction is darkly ironic, pessimistic, and tired. In his novels, Bassani meditates on this historical context of his writing quite frequently: Once again, in the quiet and torpor . . . I went over in my memory the years of my early youth, both in Ferrara and in the Jewish cemetery at the end of Via Montebello. I saw once more the large fields scattered with trees, the gravestones and trunks of columns bunched up more densely along the F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W 1 3 5 R surrounding and dividing walls, and as if again before...