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A review by fionnualalirsdottir
The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles by Giorgio Bassani
This is the second of Giorgio Bassani's novels about his home town of Ferrara, all written after he had left the town and settled in Rome. There are six in total, and as I make my way through them (I'm currently on the fifth), I'm realising that together they amount to quite a Proustian search for a lost time and a lost place: Ferrara between the wars.
In the first book of his Ferrara cycle, 'Within the Walls', Bassani's narrators were a little mysterious. They revealed nothing of themselves not even their names. The narrator of this book is a lot more forthcoming. We still don't know his name but we know that he's about twenty, that he lives with his parents and two younger siblings, that he takes the train from Ferrara to Bologna each day to study literature at the university there. We know that he and his family live on via Scandiana, that a family friend, Doctor Fadigati (who resembles Proust's Baron Charlus quite a bit) lives nearby on via Gargadello, and that both the narrator's family and the doctor spend the summer months during the mid 1930s at the seaside resort of, not Balbec, but Riccione. We also know, if we've picked up anything at all about Giorgio Bassani's own life, that the unnamed narrator's profile matches the author's in the way Marcel Proust's narrator's profile matches his own.
But having understood the author/narrator correspondence, the reader quickly sets it aside and focuses on the episode in the narrator's life that's being recounted here, and what it means in the context of the larger story that's being constructed over the course of the six volumes. For me, this episode is about awakening. As the sunlight sparkles on the sea, and on Fadigati's gold-rimmed spectacles, a dark cloud seems to have gathered over the narrator's head. In spite of his father's unwavering support for everything fascist, in spite of Fadigati's seeming insouciance for the opinion of others, the narrator is increasingly aware of the threat posed to minorities under fascist rule. What will the racial laws mean for the Jewish community of Ferrara? And what does the increasingly intolerant atmosphere bode for his friend, Doctor Fadigati.
In the first book of his Ferrara cycle, 'Within the Walls', Bassani's narrators were a little mysterious. They revealed nothing of themselves not even their names. The narrator of this book is a lot more forthcoming. We still don't know his name but we know that he's about twenty, that he lives with his parents and two younger siblings, that he takes the train from Ferrara to Bologna each day to study literature at the university there. We know that he and his family live on via Scandiana, that a family friend, Doctor Fadigati (who resembles Proust's Baron Charlus quite a bit) lives nearby on via Gargadello, and that both the narrator's family and the doctor spend the summer months during the mid 1930s at the seaside resort of, not Balbec, but Riccione. We also know, if we've picked up anything at all about Giorgio Bassani's own life, that the unnamed narrator's profile matches the author's in the way Marcel Proust's narrator's profile matches his own.
But having understood the author/narrator correspondence, the reader quickly sets it aside and focuses on the episode in the narrator's life that's being recounted here, and what it means in the context of the larger story that's being constructed over the course of the six volumes. For me, this episode is about awakening. As the sunlight sparkles on the sea, and on Fadigati's gold-rimmed spectacles, a dark cloud seems to have gathered over the narrator's head. In spite of his father's unwavering support for everything fascist, in spite of Fadigati's seeming insouciance for the opinion of others, the narrator is increasingly aware of the threat posed to minorities under fascist rule. What will the racial laws mean for the Jewish community of Ferrara? And what does the increasingly intolerant atmosphere bode for his friend, Doctor Fadigati.