The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

INCLUDES RECENTLY DISCOVERED NEW MATERIAL. In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Italy

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Tomasi was born in Palermo to Giulio Maria Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa and Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, and Beatrice Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filangieri di Cutò. He became an only child after the death (from diphtheria) of his sister. He was very close to his mother, a strong personality who influenced him a great deal, especially because his father was rather cold and detached. As a child he studied in their grand house in Palermo with a tutor (including the subjects of literature and English), with his mother (who taught him French), and with a grandmother who read him the novels of Emilio Salgari. In the little theater of the house in Santa Margherita di Belice, where he spent long vacations, he first saw a performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet, performed by a company of travelling players. His cousin was Fulco di Verdura.

Reviews

[Nick Grammos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The divinities frescoed in the ceilings awoke.

They won’t succeed because we are gods… Sicilians never want to improve because they think themselves perfect. their vanity is stronger than their misery

Those desiccated trees yearning away under bleached sky bore many a message…

There are wonderful artful excesses in this book, the descriptions of places, paintings, people, artworks leap off the page like heavily applied paint. The erotic discoveries of nephew Tancredi and the beautiful Angelica through the forgotten rooms of the Donnafugata palace simulate sex through entrances and exits of secret, or hidden, unexplored rooms. These rooms seem to grow both in number and possibility as the two lovers explore them. The effect is like tromp-l’oeil: we see more than what is there – the image endlessly expanding through corridors the way architectural and divine figures ascend into the heavens of cathedrals: see the quadratura effect of Fra Andrea Pozzo in The Apotheosis of St. Ignatius, ceiling fresco, Church of Sant’Ignazio, Rome. 1685–1694.

As I got near the end of this age of change novel, I wondered if I would ever get to read it one more time before my own departure from this earth. I know, I’m too easily influenced by books. You see, old Don Fabrizio, The Prince, the Leopard of the story, sees his own decline and that of his ruling class of Sicilian nobles. Change is as constant as the desire for everything to remain the same.

The whole book is like a contemplative soliloquy – an ideal form to take in the passing of time and an entire era. It can take in the sumptuous feasts at a ball, the pettiness of all of us, the landscape and the smells, the privileges and miseries, the pain of lost love, astronomy, the attachment of animals to masters, the mysteries of lost peach crops and on and on. Hostages are dismembered, poverty violates opportunity, the rich and miserly plunder and impoverish, wars kill naïve young men to fester in palace orchards. I’m only skimming the surface of the encyclopaedic subjects covered effortlessly here. The number of subjects covered expresses the weight of what will be lost through the passage of time and human predilection for change. Only Don Fabrizio can look back on his observations since he takes little part in the change that transforms Sicily with the unification of Italy. He pushes the marriage of his impoverished nephew, a minor prince, to the richest of the emerging class of opportunists, the Sedaras, in the same way he accepts and even encourages the yes vote in the unification plebiscite.

Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discomfort under his Jove-like frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without making, still less, wanting to make, any move to change it.

I couldn’t help notice how observant Lampedusa is of the cycles of political change. The 19thC becomes the central point through which we can see the libertine excesses of the 18thc nobility through the decline of the brother-in-law, the 19thC rise of democratic and nationalistic fervour, republicanism and the decline of the aristocracy and into the 20thC & 21stC, the patterns of voting against one’s interests, the rise of the liberal classes under the banner of freedom and rights to self-determination. You can stand still and think you’ve seen it all before.

But it’s really the sumptuousness of it all that makes me hope I get to read it once more. This is my third time. I don’t want to miss its blinding beauty and equally penetrating observations:

It was a garden for the blind: a constant offence to the eyes, a pleasure strong if somewhat crude to the nose.

And in this garden, the world intrudes:

He remembered the nausea diffused throughout the entire villa by certain sweetish odours before their cause was traced: the corpse of a young soldier … under the lemon tree.

This may be one of the most extraordinary books you could ever read.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this book many times, my list below can only be said to be partial, I read it before I saw the film and it is one the few books which has inspired a work of cinematic genius but also a film which while in no way betraying its source material was not tied to it. It is one of the great novels of the 20th century, it is probably one of the great novels of all time, though how you define one I could not say. I have owned and lost many copies of this book but as soon as I can I always replace it.

How do you review a book that you consider not only great but that you love? I can't because it is so great and it is to wrapped up in my reading life and also elements of my sentimental life (bizarrely I took a boy I thought I was in love with to see the film in the hope of? what? to convince him I was cultured and sophisticated he was? because I had no idea how to go about seducing him? probably a bit of both. It is only that the memory of this boy who I loved but who didn't love me, who was far more beautiful but nowhere near as cultured or sophisticated as I was, and who didn't need to be seduced because he doffed his clothes with alacrity for everyone, but me, is intertwined with 'The Leopard' that I can recall my inexperienced self and that cruel, shallow, beautiful youth with tenderness. Of course seeing him 25 years later fat and bald helps).

I could try and discuss the layered meanings of the novel and its story both within its specific Italian context and what in it is universal. I could elaborate on why I think The Leopard is, in some ways, what Evelyn Waugh wanted to but failed create in his account of the doomed Marchmain of Brideshead. I would certainly point the novel out as why all literary trends and fashions should be ignored as ephemeral nonsense and abjectly poor a guide to what will last. It is also the novel which, if I could only save one for posterity, I would chose.

Honestly The Leopard is the sort of book which, if you are going to read it, you probably already know. Just as you will know within a few pages that it is a book you will always love. This is just a wonderful, wonderful book.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Leopard (1958) is a classic work of Italian literature, noted in 1001 Books as having received unexpected international success. It was widely translated and made into a film starring (of all people!) Burt Lancaster in 1963. (I’ve seen this film, probably the restored version of 1980, and it’s been hard not to have Lancaster’s image interfering with my imagination as I read the book at last.) But I didn’t find any mention of The Leopard in Italian Literature, a Very Short Introduction because as 1001 Books notes, The Leopard was outside the prevailing postwar Italian neorealist narrative tradition, both stylistically and thematically.

While neorealism centred on low-class characters and unveiled the crude reality of fascist Italy, The Leopard is the saga of the aristocratic Sicilian family of the Salinas (whose coat of arms bears a leopard). (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Edited Peter Boxall, ABC Books, 2006 edition, p. 520)

So why should a family saga, a piece of historical fiction about the decline of an aristocratic family during the Risorgimento (the C19th unification of Italy), have the gravitas that it does?

Well…

From 1860 to 1910, a series of events affects the microcosm of the protagonist, Prince Fabrizio, and his relatives, as well as the macrocosm of the Italian nation. In Italy’s south, the Bourbon kingdom is crumbling under the impetus of Garibaldi, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is being joined with the rest of the country; however the end of Spanish colonisation coincides with the death of the aristocracy, which had long been supported by the feudal system and which is being supplanted by the bourgeoisie. The Leopard portrays the melancholy of that loss. (1001 Books, again)

What 1001 Books doesn’t mention, is the humour in the book.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/13/t...

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime.

[Kitty McManus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring, not my style of writing to read

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to come across as a philistine but although this book gave a sense of place and time I found it quite lugubrious. There is little story as such, but events flow like olive oil meandering across a marble floor. Read alongside the Montelbano books, it appears that Sicily has changed very little in a hundred or so years; the only difference being the families in whose hands the power lies. The overarching theme of this is loss of prestige, power, art, beauty... And all returns to dust and ashes... There is a sense of outrage at the loss of frescoes and architecture as a result of the 1943 Allied invasion (bombs destroy ancestral homes); the 'places of my infancy' has been written with a sense of melancholy and nostalgia. The 'If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change' is said by Tancredi, the impetuous and impecunious nephew of Don Fabrizio who lands on his feet by marrying the beautiful daughter of a nouveau riche.
The shaft of light in what would otherwise be a source book for those who want to experience life a couple of centuries ago is the short story 'the professor and the siren', which was captivating ( again probably says more about me...), enthralling but still had that sense of something lost and never to be reclaimed. And all returns to the sea.

[Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I seem to be drawn to stories of decline. This ranks close to Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family and Radetzky March. Very enjoyable read, with moments of humour and sadness touching the Sicilian characters. Well worth it.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The main character: The Prince of Salina carries a heavy burden - responsibility for his family and extended family, his servants and the future of his estate. It is 1860 in what we know as Italy and the winds of change are gathering. The reader shares in the Prince's isolation and there are touching comedic moments as well as melancholy. The author's observations are told in good descriptive prose which is a delight to read.

[Tom Drake · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5