Description
Book SynopsisGiorgio Bassani’s six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be.
Trade Review"A book of immense pathos, eloquence, elegiac splendor." -- Harold Bloom
"The power of Bassani’s writing is such that, for a moment, his transitory world seems beautifully everlasting." -- Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
"Essential reading for anyone thirsting for an understanding of the complex density of Europe’s multicultural inheritance." -- Fernanda Eberstadt - New York Times Book Review
"By connecting with [Giorgio] 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
"[Bassani] could rightly place himself among the great Italian realist writers.… McKendrick is alert to Bassani’s cosmopolitanism and deep affinity for the English literary tradition, and doesn’t obscure the allusions Bassani certainly intended." -- Laura Kolbe - New York Review of Books
"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 - Guardian
"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
"As a mirror held up to Bassani’s generation,
The Novel of Ferrara embodies a cautious optimism about how much this generation–and the ones to follow–might learn from its forebears’ mistakes. In its clear-eyed realism about the limits to such learning, as well as in the empathy with which it insists on pursuing it, Bassani’s Novel is a remarkable achievement." -- Marta Figlerowicz - Yale Review
"Bassani’s monumental elegy to the city’s doomed Jewish community restores the dignity that it is owed even as it compels us to relive the devastation endured." -- Diane Cole - Jewish Review of Books
"In a new translation by Jamie McKendrick, [
The Novel of Ferrara] conveys a feeling of haze and depth, a sense of an old and inscrutable magic no less entrancing for often being dark." -- Talya Zaks - Forward
