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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
Published in 1958, Giorgio Bassani's novella is the first of his cycle of novels set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara. Although less well known than its successor, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, it offers perhaps the most concise distillation of Bassani's art: elegant, elegiac, and with a profound attachment to the specificities of time and place. The novella tells the story of the gradual marginalisation, over the course of the 1930s, of the gay doctor Athos Fadigati: once a pillar of bourgeois society, his taste for young men leads to his ostracisation and eventual suicide. Bassani's controlled style and lightness of touch transform a seemingly slight premise into a metaphor for the slide of Italy into fascism. --Ben Hutchinson, The Observer
