The Leopard [Paperback]

Giuseppe di Lampedusa (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 23, 1991

A classic of modern fiction. Set in the 1860s, THE LEOPARD is the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification grows inevitable, the smallest of gestures seems dense with meaning and melancholy, sensual agitation and disquiet: "Some huge irrational disaster is in the making." All around him, the prince, Don Fabrizio, witnesses the ruin of the class and inheritance that already disgust him. His favorite nephew, Tancredi, proffers the paradox, "If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change," but Don Fabrizio would rather take refuge in skepticism or astronomy, "the sublime routine of the skies."

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, also an astronomer and a Sicilian prince, was 58 when he started to write The Leopard, though he had had it in his mind for 25 years. E. M. Forster called his work "one of the great lonely books." What renders it so beautiful and so discomfiting is its creator's grasp of human frailty and, equally, of Sicily's arid terrain--"comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung waves into frenzy." The author died at the age of 60, soon after finishing The Leopard, though he did live long enough to see it rejected as unpublishable.

Review

...Lampedusa's deftness with words is so fine that, although nothing much appears to happen in the book ... to many readers The Leopard is the greatest Italian novel this century, perhaps the greatest ever, and uniquely relevant to modern Italy. -- The Economist

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (July 23, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679731210
• ISBN-13: 978-0679731214
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (81 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #646,329 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

214 of 221 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great novel, beautifully written and very moving, September 5, 2000

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Leopard (Paperback)

I approached The Leopard with high expectations which were thoroughly satisfied. The novel, apparently based on the life of di Lampedusa's great-grandfather, is the story of a proud, sensual, Sicilian aristocrat at the time of Italy's Risorgimento (1860 or thereabouts), and his reaction to the changes he sees in his society: mainly the inevitable, indeed necessary, but still in some ways regrettable displacement of the aristocracy from their traditional position. The title character is a wonderful creation, and the lesser characters about him (his wife and children, his favorite nephew, the Jesuit priest Father Pirrone, and so on), are also very elegantly depicted. The Sicilian countryside, and telling details of social life at that time period, are also fascinating elements of the book. And finally, the prose is wonderful, and this translation seems very good, save for just a couple mild moments of clunkiness.

The Leopard is the story of Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, at the time of the main action a man in his forties, with several children. He is a sort of benevolent tyrant in his household, a man of a very old family, accustomed to knowing his place and to having those about him know their places. The Prince is also a man of great sensual appetites, careless with his money (though not wasteful or dissolute), politically knowledgeable but completely apolitical in action, and also an amateur astronomer of some note.

When the story opens, the Risorgimento is ongoing, but it is clear that it will be ultimately successful, and that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies will be absorbed into the newly unified, somewhat more democratic, Italy. Don Fabrizio, out of loyalty, is nominally supportive of the old regime, but he realistically stays out of the conflict. His favorite nephew, Tancredi, the penniless but charismatic son of his sister, is an ardent supporter of Garibaldi (leader of the revolution).

Several long chapters, separated by months, follow the progress of the Risorgimento at a distance, and more closely follow events which impinge directly on Don Fabrizio's life, yet which reflect the coming societal changes. These include the plebiscite to confirm popular support for the unification of Italy, his nephew Tancredi's love affair and eventual marriage to the daughter of a wealthy but decidedly lower class neighbor, his daughter's reaction to the attentions of a friend of Tancredi's, and Father Pirrone's visit to his home village. Finally, the action jumps forward some decades to the Prince's death, in a very moving and beautiful chapter, then still further forward to the household of his unmarried daughters in their old age.

The events of the story tellingly illustrate both the changing face of society and also the nature of Sicilian society in general. At another level, the Prince's aging and death, and his knowledge of his own mortality, echo the senescence of his class. Loving descriptions of the Prince's homes, of his meals, of balls, of hunting, of peasant life, of politics both at the Prince's level and at the level of the peasants, of the attitude of churchmen towards their flock (especially Father Pirrone's toleration but not approval of his friend's sensual escapades) are laced throughout the novel. Moreover, the Prince himself is a truly compelling, charismatic character, full of faults but an admirable man nonetheless. Also, the narrator's voice is often with us, ironically, often even cynically, commenting on the expectations of the characters and both their failings and the failings of "real life" to meet their expectations, but, though sad, the voice is never bitter.

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Important Novel, September 11, 2005

By 

Bhupinder Singh "bs" (Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Leopard (Paperback)

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa wrote only one novel ('The Leopard') in his lifetime and that too was published posthumously. Thus one of the most important 20th century novel in the Italian language was never seen in print by the author himself.

The novel is situated during the time of the Italian re-unification, the rise of Garibaldi and his Red Shirt movement and the decline and subsequent transformation of the feudal nobility in the late nineteenth century. Di Lampedusa was himself was himself a descendent of one the noble families and the story that he narrates is ostensibly that of his grandfather. 'The Leopard' is the symbol of the family of which Prince Fabrizio, the principal character in the novel, is the head.

The novel reminded me of a couple of other such works, one of which is surely the Century in Scarlet by the Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy. Both deal with more or less the same theme, though from somewhat different sides. Zilahy's novel too deals with the coming into being of the Hungarian nation in the twentieth century- thus both deal with the coming into being of modern nation states and identities of two nations that were probably at the far end of the nation forming processes that were set into motion a century or more earlier in some of the other European states. I am not sure how comprehensive the novels are from a sociological or political point of view, but both do provide the nearest equivalent in a literary form.

Both the novels are very straightforward in nature and though written in the 20th century, they are in the nature of the 19th century novel, with a linear narrative structure and few complexities in terms of the underlying ideas they seek to communicate. The style is closest to Balzac's, more in case of The Leopard than perhaps The Century in Scarlet. This is not the place to go in for a deeper analysis of The Century in Scarlet, but here are a few words on The Leopard.

The story is straight forward, that of Prince Fabrizio who is forced to relinquish the control of his estates in the light of the advance of Garbaldi's republican forces. His ambitious nephew Tancredi moves over to the new forces, calculatedly marrying the daughter of a rising rich, though uncouth merchant Don Calogero who is eager to establish a 'lineage' for himself by marrying into the family of a noble, in the process spurning Fabrizio's own daughter's hand . "Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they'll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change", he informs his uncle, even as he looks at his uncle with the 'affectionate irony that youth accords to age'.

That Prince Fabrizio aids and abets his nephew in his cunning endeavors speaks much of the Prince's own instinct for survival. "The bourgeois revolution climbing his stairs in Don Calogero's tail coat", as the Prince thinks while observing Don Calogero in his house.

And historically speaking he is right, the decline of the nobility is complete and the power has shifted decisively in favour of the commercial bourgeoise, with the corresponding shift from the monarchy to a republic and the ideological shift from the church- when the nobility's land is ostensibly 'the patrimony of the poor'- to the republican ideals.

With the story being as simple as that what holds the reader is the author's effusive description of some of the lesser known areas of Europe- Siciliy in this case. Added to that is the author's deep insight into human nature, which renders the novel a universal appeal and finally his smooth, delectable, almost tropical prose. His metaphors are particularly imaginative and I suppose that probably owes something to the richness of the original language itself.

Here is a description of the Prince's family as they sit down for dinner:

"The girls plump, glowing, with gay dimples, and between the forehead and the nose the frown which was the hereditary mark of the Salinas; the males slim but wiry, wearing an expression of fashionable melancholy as they wielded knives and forks with subdued violence."

And that of the Prince Fabrizio himself:

"...in his blood also fermented other German strains particularly disturbing to a Sicilian aristocrat in the year 1860, however attractive his fair skin and hair amid all that olive and black: an authoritarian temperament, a certain rigidity in morals and a propensity for abstract ideas; these in the relaxing atmosphere of Palermo society, had changed respectively into capricious arrogance, recurring moral scruples, and contempt for his own relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to him mere driftwood in the languid meandering stream of Sicilian pragmatism... Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make any move toward saving it."

This in essence also sums up the novel itself.

There are a number of insightful sentences that are a delight for a reader. Though the novel may beg comparison with, say, a 'War and Peace', to say nothing of a novel like Mario Vargas Llosa's 'The War of the End of the World' which is far more complex in the treatment of a similar theme. Nevertheless 'The Leoprad' establishes itself as a minor classic of the 20th century and hence an important novel to those trying to understand the evolution of nations in an era that seems to be dissolving a number of attributes of what have been associated with the nation and national identities.

56 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ASTOUNDING AND SUBLIME, August 9, 2008

By 

Luca Graziuso (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Leopard: A Novel (Paperback)

Guido Waldman's traslation of Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi's introduction is a boon for the literary scene. Lampedusa's nephew, runs a detailed history of the the novel's publication and more importantly here included are passages Lampedusa wrote for the book that were omitted by the original Italian editors and subsequent English versions.

To read Di Lampedusa in Italian is like reading Proust in French, which is to say it is characterized by a melodious dalliance that lulls and swells in dreamscapes of intellectual brilliance. Guido Waldman, whose efforts include the Oxford edition of Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" (not an enviable task - imagine translating into a collected allegorical prose Spencer's "Faery Queen"), invariably paces the rhythm of the English in a comparable rendition, while attuning the lyricism in delicate cadances.

"The Leopard" represents a command of style and a robust poetic affluence that is exceptional. The vigour and audacity of the novel is never compromised throughout its scope and vision, and moreover it is persistently haunted by spectres of an apocalyptic doom loitering lustfully. To read this novel is to witness the expression of a community in distress as it finds itself fidgeting to keep its composure while arrested amidst a stalemate, as it were a cultural limbo. Giuseppe Di Lampedusa fashions a circumventing microcosmic portrait that is nostalgic and entertaining. Episodes of ribaldry abound yet they always steer clear of expressing disrespect for a tradition and a cultural milieu that preserves its ambiguity and its inconsolable propriety. The discomfort of the probing characters is strung and picked so as to strike a melodious ravishment that transgresses all values and disarms the structural apogee of the narrative. In its many particulars, and brusque, yet delicate lyrical tendencies, this novel gives delusional recordings of an island distant and beyond memory. Here we hear the tourbadour's chant nearing with incredulous apathy, both the harmony of a siren song and the discordant twang of a swan song lingering beyond the sheet-music read. It's as if a protracted melancholia overtook a whole culture and a poetic instinct becomes embalmed in its people. Sicilians have a heritage of millions of years which resonates throughout, and apologizing for my not being a Sicilian, I would suggest a visit to Siracusa, Palermo, Catania, or even off the coast to Taranto (Calabria) to remind us that the Odyssey's tales mostly take place in and around this island. Di Lampedusa is a classic man of letters, with an Odyssyan propensity for exploring the whims of human nature and exposing the forces that cross the devide that stands between loyalty and desire. I have found such a high quality of "delightful disturbance" only in a handful of artists - Primaraly in De Chirico's paintings, which parallels astoundingly well alongside any reading of "Il Gattopardo". In literature one may well liken Di Lampedusa to the late Thomas Mann (esp. "The Magic Mountain"). In "The Leopard" a uniique stunning clarity pervades. Stunning for the acceptance of its fading way of life consacrating a culture in decadence; while the clarity of classical beauty is flawlessly contained. It is impossibly beautiful and sublime. Here Di Lampedusa conspires to invite us on a voyage with sails withdrawn, impressively seized within a standstill. Chimed from afar floats a decadent sweltering heat, while basking underneath is found the novel's storyline. Please plug your ears, or have someone tie you to something or other, else would that you were to tune in you'd never leave: In blissfull obliviousness you'd perish along this shoreline! Hereby the island's lure is a felicitous narrative that speaks fables of yesterday in daring, lingering overtones, consonant with the cunning splendid mirage of sex appeal.... And an applause to Guido Waldman, who deserves unrestrained praise for his labours as they shall now translate into our delights, adding considerably to the overall excellence of Archibald Colquhoun's translation, the novel has reached the shores of its definitive version.