The Heron

A new translation of Bassani’s haunting last novel- a portrait of a middle-aged man’s reckoning with life and loneliness

In the fifth book of the Romanzo di Ferrara, Bassani follows a day in the slipping life of Edgardo Limentani, a man of forty-five who sets out with a shooting party into the watery countryside surrounding Ferrara. As the day wears on, his malaise grows, seeping from his thoughts and feelings into the natural world around him, until it reaches an intolerable pitch. This taut depiction of one man’s reckoning with his unfulfilling life evokes in cinematic detail how inescapable loneliness turns to despair.