A confession without filters

On the period of creation of the heron, perhaps the strangest novel of the novelist ferrarés, Paola Bassani remembers:

"My father had a great depression in that period. He had myself separated of my mother, although he came every day to house. He had a study destined mainly to mark that new independence. It felt that its work had reached a level that was to him difficult to surpass. It was described like magnolia that he himself had planted in the garden in front of house. It was a tree that seemed to have arrived at its apogee and to that only it had left to agonize. In the book, Limentani survives as if outside a lost thing between the things and, then, reacts against that alienation. It wants to die because the death is beautiful, even though also seems to him another form of alienation. Separated of the reality by its condition of rentista, that guarantees a suffocating security at the same time to him and a slow decay, account occurs of which their social class and it, like individual, no longer have importance. The life happens far from the old gentlemen like him, rest of other times. It decides, therefore, to kill itself to return to the reality, to hit against her. Once seizure that decision, recovers the joy, the lightness, returns to love its family and, arrived at that point, it notices that it has fallen again in a mirage, that has tended a trap, and it is killed; that way, it happens for the first time to the act. Afternoon that papa finished that novel, I was next to him. She was an adolescent. I saw pale, desperate. I asked to him what happened to him and it said me that that book to which had put to him full stop was not worth anything. It was to him almost revolting. It gave me to read the text. I read it with anguish and with incomodidad, because there were intimate scenes and, really, it was my father and I a girl to whom it needed much experience. I did not know what to say to him. His friend Niccol˜ Gallo read it soon and he said that papa had written something very strange, something to me apparently very distant of its spirit. For the cover, my father chose an image of a picture of Francis Bacon in which he sees himself a destroyed man, covered with blood. The heron was a species of confession, but without filters, in which it had gone until the bottom of itself. Perhaps it had the force to do it because then it was giving lessons on the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sófocles in the Academy of Dramatic Art. He is not accidental that the heron respects the three aristotelian units of the tragedy: the action and time, place unit.

"There is an aspect of the book that ties it with gatopardo. Limentani, like the prince of Salt mines, is a man who has been marginalized by the historical facts. Towards year ends 60, the artistic and literary vanguard of the time and the historical facts marked a fort contrasts with the spiritual universe of my father. Peculiarly, he, who had discovered gatopardo and he had published it in 1958, said that Tomasi I gave Lampedusa had been able to write that admirable novel because he had been preceded by the postwar period Literature and, more indeed, by Histories of Ferrara. Several famous critical and writers as Elio Vittorini had rejected the novel of Lampedusa, when still she was unpublished, because they considered a narration traditional, a mere overturned historical novel on the past, my father always maintained that gatopardo spoke of modern Italy, at heart, of the State and the individuals of any time."