On this, my second reading of Giorgio Bassani's novel about Ferrara in the years before World War II, I wonder if an alternative title might be The Sleepwalkers. The Jewish characters seem immobilized by passivity in the face of threats that escalated in 1938 with the imposition of the Racial Laws. Life goes on, characters fall in love and play tennis, and Il Duce is nothing more than a faint background buzz.
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