A Question of Time

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS by Giorgio Bassani. 293 pages. Atheneum. $4.95.

The Leopard has sired a cub. Giuseppe di Lampedusa's posthumous novel described the life of a decaying aristocratic family during a period of social crisis in Sicily; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis describes the life of a decaying upper-class family during a period of social crisis in Ferrara. What's more, Novelist Bassani, an established poet, critic and editor who was responsible for the publication of The Leopard, has obviously learned from the master: his style is as rich and iridescent as Lampedusa's, and the substance of his novel is similarly sturdy stuff.

Contemptuous Enclave. The Finzi-Continis are proud, pretentious, cultivated Jews, living in world-weary isolation behind the walls of their vast estate, which survives like a verdant enclave in the provincial city of Ferrara. Father Ermanno is an aging scholar-gentleman who has passed his life in obscure antiquarian studies, and who regards the Fascists with courtly contempt. Mother Olga is an aristocratic wraith who lives only to mourn the death of her six-year-old child. Son Alberto is a languid dilettante. Daughter Micol is a beautiful, spirited intellectual who cannot bring herself to escape the family's fortress of unreality.

Fascinated by this elegant, decadent little world is the sensitive, literary son of a freethinking, middle-class Jewish doctor. Gradually, as Fascist racial laws isolate and draw together the Jews of Ferrara, a tenuous intimacy develops with Micol. She leads him on, rejects him; leaves Ferrara, returns. He haunts the house, pursues her by phone, abuses and amuses and even makes love to her.

In the end, finding himself imprisoned in the moribund Eden that the Finzi-Continis have chosen to inhabit, he breaks off with Micol, begins to live a life on his own. A few years later, he witnesses the final destruction of the family: Alberto succumbs to a malignant disease; Micol and her parents are deported to Germany, presumably to die in the Nazis' gas chambers.

Burnished Symbols. In a way, death was what the Finzi-Continis had always wanted; and it is Author Bassani's subtle achievement to have described their lives with compassion but without sentimentality. His style is graceful, disciplined, direct. Occasional Italicisms will distract American readers, and few of the characters are drawn in detail. But Bassani's principal concern is with mood and meaning, and his leisurely, Proustian sentences brush and burnish a world of unexpected symbols. Although the novel is about Jews, it is only incidentally about Jewishness; the Finzi-Continis' confrontation with Fascism is employed to expose a painful paradox: life can be understood only in the past, but only in the present can it be lived. The problem is how to do both.

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