The Heron     by Giorgio Bassani, Translated by William Weaver Original title: L’airone Original language: Italian Published by Harcourt Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 190 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.47 x 7.98 x 5.36 ISBN: 0156400855 Edition: 1st Harvest/HBJ ed List Price: £5.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £5.95 Published by Harcourt Pub. Date: April 1970 Format: Hardcover ISBN: 0151400954 List Price: $5.95 Not available for ordering Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 192 pages List Price: £7.95 Not available for ordering

The protagonist of this psychological novel personifies the post-liberation (1945) generation in Italy and the frustration of the ideals experienced in those years. Bassani follows a day in the life of Edgardo Limentani — his last day. It’s a long, drawn-out day in which memories of his past that have been soothed by time and emotions which he has long pursued but never captured come floating to the surface as he hunts in the River Po delta near Ferrara, an unending landscape of plains and water. From the hide where he awaits his prey, Limentani, a lawyer, suddenly sees a heron flying unhurriedly across the sky. One cruel shot brings the creature plunging to the ground and he plans to turn its solemn, graceful beauty into an object stuffed with straw. The wounded heron’s attempts to stay alive are futile, and become in Limentani’s eyes a symbol of human suffering, of man’s vain efforts to acquire values that he has been stripped of from the start and that only death can give back in the frozen beauty of embalming.

The idea of suicide dawns on him a little later on while he is standing by a shop window with a colourful display of stuffed birds and in that moment it appears to him as the only liberating and —redeeming act he can undertake.

Edgardo Limentani seems to be ’yesterday’s man’, moving through a landscape forever changing and slipping away, a watery, misty flat land, where a trick of the light renders everything insubstantial. Perhaps he’s not even yesterday’s man — that seems to be the ex-fascist Bellagarta who has moved away from politics into becoming a hotelier catering to the nouveaux riches. Limentani is like the heron, a large impractical bird; inedible and not really worth stuffing either. A terribly haunting figure somehow, he evokes other denizens of ’the drowned world’ of the European Jews. In The Heron there is something of the same tone as in the work of the East European Jewish/Israeli writer S.Y.Agnon who in puzzling, deeply allusive stories conjured up what cannot be conjured — immense loss, loss on the scale of genocide. F C & R K

’He walked in haste, now at the end of the Via della Resistenza, — determined not to glance toward the great lighters and the barges lined up, as they had been that morning, along the bank of the river port. But once he had sensed at his side the presence of these mouse-coloured immobile forms, so immobile that you would think they were resting, rather than on water, on the mucky bed of the river, he couldn’t resist the temptation to stop and look at them.

He had seen boats lined up in that way countless times, especially as a boy, in the canal ports of Cesenatico, Cervia, Porto Corsini: in the days of the blissful endless holidays that were the custom then, before the first war and immediately after it. But from these — low, broad, and surmounted, not by vast, gay sails of bright colours, but by pitiful skeletal rigging in which, light and transparent as gauze, lazy shreds of fog lingered — from these there was no extracting any sense of joy, of life, of freedom.’ p146