Our unnamed narrator is a nineteen/twenty year-old student who lives in Ferrara and commutes to Bologna with a group of fellow students. The gold-rimmed spectacles belong to Dr Athos Fadigati, a popular ENT specialist with a clinic in Ferrara. He too is taking a course at Bologna, mainly for something to do on his day off, and gradually becomes involved with the much-younger students, many of whom have passed through his clinic.
The 'star' of the group is the promising young boxer Eraldo Deliliers, who seems to hold Dr Fadigati in the utmost contempt. But, come the holidays, where the middle-class Farrarese decamp en masse to Riccione on the Adriatic coast, Fadigati and Deliliers turn up together, openly a couple. Everyone is outraged, but too polite to say anything. Meanwhile, this is 1937 and our narrator and his family have other problems to contend with. Fascist Italy is debating whether to implement a Nazi-style race law, and our lead family is Jewish, albeit Papa has been a Fascist from the early days and nobody seems to be actually practicing their faith. Our narrator, by the way, is an atheist.
It's only a hundred-page novella, on the face of it a take on Death in Venice, but in fact The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is so much more. Bassani wrote autobiographical fiction, all of which combines into what became known as The Novel of Ferrara. The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is the second book; the first is a collection of five shorter stories. Thus he spends as long creating the detail of the town as he does the creation of his characters. They are one - and yet our hero and Dr Fadigati are outsiders, by race in one case, by sexuality in the other. Our hero and Fadigati are true friends, supportive of one another. In an ideal world they belong together. A lesser novelist might have tried to arrange it thus. Not Bassani. He tells it how it was.
A twentieth century classic. Magnificent.
