Why can't we grow up / and live in the garden

/ and never get tired

The focal point of Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is more than just a garden, in a very literal sense – it is a large estate requiring a bicycle to get from gate to front door, filled with trees, large enough to get lost in. Like Brideshead, Gatsby's lawn, maybe all literary gardens from Eden on, it is most of all a lost estate, a paradise the narrator has no chance of regaining. From the beginning of the book the loss is recognised as final; the Finzi-Continis the narrator knew, we are told, do not rest within the family mausoleum but were taken on the death trains to Germany, never to return. The reader spends the novel hoping for something that can bring some consolation for this terrible fact.