The Leopard: A Novel
by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
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Book Summary Information
Author: Giuseppe Di LampedusaTranslator: Archibald Colquhuon
Foreword: Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-11-06
ISBN: 0375714790
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Book Reviews of The Leopard: A Novel
Book Review: Nobility
Summary: 5 Stars
Giuseppe di Lampedusa died when he was sixty years old. "The Leopard," his only novel, had been roundly rejected by every major publisher in Italy by then, and he never saw it in print. There's something poetically appropriate about that, however tragic it might be in real life; "The Leopard" is, after all, a book full of death.
Not that it's depressing. On the contrary, one might find it positively inspiring. There's no doubt, however, that it concerns a time and a place where a certain way of living is pretty well done for, and for all their practicalities, the Salina family is a romantic bunch. Being of the noble class, they look upon their own disappearance with a sigh of regret rather than a scream of panic, as does the narration itself. So it's a book full of death, certainly, but it's also a noble book about the nobility that invites us to be noble, too. Which is really a compliment of the highest kind.
At various points in the novel I wished I knew more about Italian history, especially the Risorgimento, the period during which the multiple Italian states came together into a united (more or less) nation. That's the time frame of this book, after all (it corresponds roughly to the time of the American Civil War), and although the narrator and his characters all know pretty well what's going on, most of today's readers probably won't. All you really need to know, though, is that the Salinas will not have quite the same position under a united Italy as they have had in the separate Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, that the unification is inevitable, that most of them know that perfectly well, and that they feel sort of ambivalent about the whole thing.
This is particularly true of the Salina family patriarch, Don Fabrizio, who bears the title Prince and is occasionally called the Leopard because that's the Salinas' family emblem. In some ways he's about what you would expect a nobleman to be. He's refined, elegant, strong and virile. He knows a lot about clothes and wine and stuff like that. And, of course, he's loaded. On the other hand, he's also a man of science and a mathematician, having published scholarly work in astronomy. He's politically astute, and he's a terrific judge of character. That's why he knows that his children are no great shakes, alas. On the other hand, he's got a nephew, a young man named Tancredi who has no money at all thanks to the extravagance of his father, but does have a good share of Don Fabrizio's brains. He's smart enough, for instance, to go join the revolution, saying that "if things are to stay the same, they're going to have to change."
He's also smart enough, with Don Fabrizio's hearty concurrence, to pursue a marriage with Angelica, the stunningly beautiful daughter of a nouveau-riche peasant type who has gotten himself elected mayor of a small town where the Salinas have a great estate. So there's your setup, folks. The Salinas, with varying degrees of cooperation, bow to the inevitable and try to come out of these great changes with some of their pride and status intact.
Sounds pretty cold-hearted, to be sure, and the narrator doesn't bother to deny this. Unlike most novelists, Lampedusa spends a certain amount of time informing us directly of his characters' thoughts, not to mention future developments. It's not like Tancredi and Angelica love each other, exactly; they are certainly in love, but Lampedusa makes it clear that they each have their uses for the other, too, and advises us of what sort of marriage they will build. Even more revealing is a sort of monologue Don Fabrizio delivers to a government representative from northern Italy, there to offer the prince a position in the new Italian Senate.
In this speech, Don Fabrizio explains just why, with all gratitude, he is about to decline the offer, and moves on to a description of the Sicilian character that seems mighty bitter and angry. Look below the surface, though, and you can see that Don Fabrizio, exasperated as he is at Sicily, the Sicilians, his own family and pretty nearly everything but the stars in the sky, bears them all a great love, too. He wants the best for them, thinks he knows what it is, and has spent a good bit of his life feeling sad and disgusted because these fools won't take it.
That's the nobility I was talking about earlier. It's far from the stereotype that a noble's chief characteristic is an unwillingness to dirty his hands. In Don Fabrizio, and to a greater or lesser extent the rest of his family, nobility is a willingness to see people's faults with clarity and dry eyes, and to do what one can for them anyway, sure in the knowledge that one will receive indifference at best and violent ingratitude at worst. They used to call this attitude _noblesse oblige_, the idea that from those to whom much has been given, much is expected. The thing about "The Leopard" is that, as I said, the narrator takes a similar approach. He sees all of his characters, from laborers to kings, as clearly as can be, and yet has a soft spot for all of them.
The narrator's habit of telling us his characters' thoughts and future lives can be awkward to read at times. It would draw nothing but criticism from editors and creative writing teachers. It works, though, largely because it not only shows the narrator's noble compassion for his characters and their dying time, but invites us to see them and feel about them in the same way. Lampedusa based the character of Don Fabrizio on one of his own ancestors - that must have been an exceptional man, and "The Leopard" allows us to be likewise exceptional.
Benshlomo says, Your best self is available always.
Summary of The Leopard: A Novel
Set in the 1860s, The Leopard tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. The dramatic sweep and richness of observation, the seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and the grasp of human frailty imbue The Leopard with its particular melancholy beauty and power, and place it among the greatest historical novels of our time.Although Giuseppe di Lampedusa had long had the book in mind, he began writing it only in his late fifties; he died at age sixty, soon after the manuscript was rejected as unpublishable. In his introduction, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Lampedusa's nephew, gives us a detailed history of the initial publication and the various editions that followed. And he includes passages Lampedusa wrote for the book that were omitted by the original Italian editors.
Here, finally, is the definitive edition of this brilliant and timeless novel.
The Leopard is set in Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification is coming violently into being, but it transcends the historical-novel classification. E.M. Forster called it, instead, "a novel which happens to take place in history." Lampedusa's Sicily is a land where each social gesture is freighted with nuance, threat, and nostalgia, and his skeptical protagonist, Don Fabrizio, is uniquely placed to witness all and alter absolutely nothing. Like his creator, the prince is an aristocrat and an astronomer, a man "watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it." Far better to take refuge in the night skies.
What renders The Leopard so beautiful, and so despairing, is Lampedusa's grasp of human frailty and his vision 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." Though the author had long had the book in mind, he didn't begin writing it until he was in his late 50s. He died at 60, soon after it was rejected as unpublishable.
Archibald Colquhoun's lyrical translation also contains 70 more precious pages of Lampedusa--a memoir, a short story, and the first chapter of a novel. In "Places of My Infancy" the author warns that "the reader (who won't exist) must expect to be led meandering through a lost Earthly Paradise. If it bores him. I don't mind." Luckily, the reader does exist; even more luckily, boredom is not an option.
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