Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000) was a renowned Italian author,
editor, and critic who spent his youth in Ferrara. After brief
imprisonment for anti-Fascist activities, he remained in Rome until
his death. Jamie McKendrick is a poet and translator born in
Liverpool and living in Oxford, England.
André Aciman is the author of several novels including Call Me by
Your Name, Find Me, and Harvard Square, the memoir Out of Egypt,
and two books of essays. He is also the editor of The Proust
Project. He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York, where he directs the Writers’
Institute. Aciman lives with his wife and family in New York City.
"By connecting with Bassani's souls, and sometimes by even becoming
one (or all) of them, McKendrick brings to life--anew--the miracle
of translation."
*John Florio Prize for Italian Translation shortlist citation*
"Sitting beside the author watching a fire blaze--destructive,
beautiful, and above all compelling--is largely how it feels
reading Bassani's work."
*Tim Parks - Harper's Magazine*
"The book is stippled with shadow and light. Bassani pairs the
sorrow of exclusion with the hope of joy and acceptance... The
power of Bassani's writing is such that, for a moment, his
transitory world seems beautifully everlasting."
*Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal*
"The long overdue first appearance in English of Georgio Bassano's
Il romanzo di Ferrara in a single volume, as the great Italian
Jewish writer always intended, was very welcome. Translated by
Jamie McKendrick as The Novel of Ferrara, it consists of four
novels and two collections of stories, all suffused with Bassani's
melancholia and sly wit."
*Peter Parker - Spectator*
"The Novel of Ferrara can be compared to Joyce's Dubliner's or
Balzac's La Comédie Humaine; but a more fitting parallel is the
yizkor books that were produced after the Holocaust to
commemorate so many vanished Jewish towns."
*Adam Kirsch - Tablet Magazine*
"Bassani's history of the "little segregated universe" from which
he was expelled is essential reading for anyone thirsting for an
understanding of the complex density of Europe's multicultural
inheritance, or wondering whether the world we know might once
again be falling for the temptations of fascism."
*Fernanda Eberstadt - New York Times Book Review*
"Giorgio Bassani's The Novel of Ferrara, in its complete form,
splendidly translated by Jamie McKendrick, is a book of immense
pathos, eloquence, elegiac splendor, and a requiem for so much of
Italian Jewry."
*Harold Bloom*
"The best fiction writer of postwar Italy... The Novel of Ferrara
has a sensuous and subtle economy, a fulness of dramatic life and
depth of art that none of the other three [Calvino, Pasolini,
Sciascia] comes near... He wrote about exclusion, desire, betrayal,
memory."
*Peter Robb - Midnight in Sicily*
"The fiction of this most dispassionate, most merciless and
clear-eyed chronicler of the sequences and consequences of
history—in stories almost always about the city's decisions about
whom to include or exclude as its own—is, in the end, against all
the odds, a declaration of love."
*Ali Smith - The Guardian*
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