Books like Behind the Door

Even though I know we shouldn't search for autobiographical material in an author's fiction, the unnamed narrators of the Giorgio Bassani novels I've read so far have seemed to me to be stand-ins for the author, corresponding in age and family circumstances (where those are given) to the author's profile. In my imagination, the narrators are all called Giorgio — regardless of what the author may have intended. The narrator of this book is just as nameless as all the others but Bassani chose to gives us a clue as to what his name might be. It's a wonderfully staged clue and I mentally applauded when I read it. It occurs in a scene where the troubled teenage narrator comes home from school and goes straight upstairs to his room instead of into the garden to greet his mother as usual — even though she has seen him come in. The narrator had previously told us that his mother had trained as an opera singer, as did Bassani's own mother, and now he tells us that on this occasion, from his window overlooking the garden, he could hear her call his name again and again, lingering melodiously on the vowels. I imagined her looking upwards towards the opera box window of her son's bedroom, singing Gii-or-gi-o, Gi-oor-gi-o, Gii-or-gi-o…I'm certain that the soundtrack of Bassani's childhood must have included many versions of his mother's voice singing out his name over the years. ………………………………………While reading (and very much enjoying) Bassani's novels which seem to draw so closely on his own childhood and youth in between-the-wars Ferrara, fixing that time and that place in print forever, I've been finding parallels between his work and Marcel Proust's more famous account of his unnamed narrator's times and places. This book, the fourth in the Ferrara series, offered me a couple of further echoes. During their teenage years, both narrators have friends who come from a different social milieu to themselves, and towards whom they feel a sense of superiority mixed with the kind of pity people feel towards the less fortunate. However, in their case, it's a pity mixed with dislike, dislike of the way their friend expresses himself, and of his accent and mannerisms. But the friends in each case are far more shrewd and worldly-wise than the narrators, and the reader doesn't see them as objects of pity but rather as potential manipulators of their more naive friends' feelings. All of this makes us aware of the great lack of self-knowledge on the part of the two narrators. The gaining of self-knowledge is an important theme in both books, but particularly in this book by Bassani. At one point in the story, the teenage narrator stations himself behind a door in order to overhear a conversation between his friend and some other boys in his class. The experience is shattering. He hears his own personality and behavior, and his mother's personality and behavior, judged in critical and pitying terms by the friend whom he, in his blindness, believed admired him unreservedly — and respected his mother completely. There's an episode in Proust too in which the narrator discovers his friend's true opinion of him. However, it is the clandestine nature of the 'behind the door' episode in Bassani that marks the most significant parallel between the two books. Proust's narrator has a tendency towards voyeurism and often places himself in a position where he can overhear other people's conversations or observe their private actions. Sometimes he's on a stairwell, sometimes in a passageway, but on at least one occasion, he's behind a door as in Bassani's book. In one such episode, he gets an unexpected blow to his self-image: he overhears himself being discussed in critical terms by the family housekeeper whom he imagined had placed him on a very high pedestal. Acquiring self-knowledge is a painful process.