Review: Within the Walls

By Giorgio Bassani(Trans: Jamie McKendrick)

Penguin Modern Classics, £9.99

Giorgio Bassani was part of that extraordinary generation of mid-20th-century Jewish Italian writers that included Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli), Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg and Elsa Morante. Formed by fascism and then the war, they found their voices as writers after 1945.

Bassani is still best known for The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), beautifully adapted for cinema by Vittorio De Sica. Born a hundred years ago, in 1916, Bassani grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in Ferrara and his Ferrara cycle is being translated by Jamie McKendrick for Penguin Modern Classics, starting with Within the Walls, originally published in 1956.

Its five stories are mostly about love. In one, Lida has had a baby with her young sweetheart and now lives with her mother. Then an older man starts to visit and her life changes. In another, a young woman is courted by a young doctor; she is from an old country family, he's Jewish. In the final story, Night of '43, a young pharmacist marries the beautiful Anna Repetto. They have a secret: only they know about a terrible massacre that happened in Ferrara during the war.

These are quiet stories of love, often between unlikely people. They are told slowly, sedately. There is something old-fashioned about the writing but there is often a powerful, sad twist. Sometimes, it is to do with Italy's fascist past. Often, it is to do with the Holocaust. Many of Bassani's stories are about Jews. Suddenly, he will mention how a character or his or her parents were deported to Germany in 1943 and the whole feel of the story changes dramatically

One story is about the return of a young Jew from Buchenwald after the war. There is no sentimentality. He is not greeted as a hero or given any kind of welcome. Quite the opposite. "By now," writes Bassani, "there was hardly anyone who didn't keep him at bay, who didn't flee him like the plague."

The key word is "now". Bassani's stories are about time unfolding, with flashbacks to the past. And then you realise he is juggling two, often three moments in time at once.

These stories, which seem so simple, are surprisingly complicated, like playing three-dimensional chess in time, involving three moments in the past, one of which might be full of tragedy, which changes the way you think about the others. No one else writes about time like this. Bassani is deeply unsettling and yet a joy to read.

Shakespeare is not the only important writer with a double-zero birthday this year.

David Herman is the JC's chief fiction reviewer