Published in 1958, Giorgio Bassani's novella is the first of his cycle of novels set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara. Although less well known than its successor, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, it offers perhaps the most concise distillation of Bassani's art: elegant, elegiac, and with a profound attachment to the specificities of time and place. The novella tells the story of the gradual marginalisation, over the course of the 1930s, of the gay doctor Athos Fadigati: once a pillar of bourgeois society, his taste for young men leads to his ostracisation and eventual suicide. Bassani's controlled style and lightness of touch transform a seemingly slight premise into a metaphor for the slide of Italy into fascism.

Crucial to this transformation is the sense of incremental shift in the characters' attitudes: "little by little, without meaning to, all of us began to show him scant respect", recalls the narrator, a position artfully shadowed by the "ever-increasing sense of intimate laceration" that Bassani traces in Fadigati. Instructive parallels are suggested more broadly between the homosexual protagonist and the Jewish narrator: where the former masochistically accepts his fate, the latter rages against the increasingly aggressive racial laws. In a manner reminiscent of Thomas Mann's early novellas, Bassani uses stylistic detail as a way both to reveal and to conceal character: the gold-rimmed spectacles of the title suggest Fadigati's highly developed aesthetic sense, but also function as his "uniform of respectability". Jamie McKendrick's unforced translation accurately captures Bassani's lucid, luminous style.

If the pathos of the novella derives from its postwar perspective on pre-war prejudice, and the way Bassani combines nostalgia for the lost world of his youth with the dreadful knowledge of what would happen to European Jewry, it is perhaps not surprising that a more recent elegist of the Jews, WG Sebald, declared this one of his favourite books.