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The Leopard: A Novel Kindle Edition
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.
(Translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun.)
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPantheon
- Publication dateOctober 2, 2013
- File size1584 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
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.
Review
—The New York Times Book Review
"A masterwork . . . A superb novel in the great tradition and the grand manner."
—Newsweek
"A majestic, melancholy, and beautiful novel."
—The New Yorker
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
May, 1860
Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.
The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Glorious and the Sorrowful Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word: love, virginity, death; and during that hum the whole aspect of the rococo drawing room seemed to change; even the parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls appeared abashed; even the Magdalen between the two windows looked a penitent and not just a handsome blonde lost in some dubious daydream, as she usually was.
Now, as the voices fell silent, everything dropped back into its usual order or disorder. Bendicò, the Great Dane, vexed at having been shut out, came barking through the door by which the servants had left. The women rose slowly to their feet, their oscillating skirts as they withdrew baring bit by bit the naked figures from mythology painted all over the milky depths of the tiles. Only an Andromeda remained covered by the soutane of Father Pirrone, still deep in extra prayer, and it was some time before she could sight the silvery Perseus swooping down to her aid and her kiss.
The divinities frescoed on the ceiling awoke. The troops of Tritons and Dryads, hurtling across from hill and sea amid clouds of cyclamen pink toward a transfigured Conca d’Oro, and bent on glorifying the House of Salina, seemed suddenly so overwhelmed with exaltation as to discard the most elementary rules of perspective; meanwhile the major gods and goddesses, the Princes among gods, thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus, had already preceded the mob of minor deities and were amiably supporting the blue armorial shield of the Leopard. They knew that for the next twenty-three and a half hours they would be lords of the villa once again. On the walls the monkeys went back to pulling faces at the cockatoos.
Beneath this Palermitan Olympus the mortals of the House of Salina were also dropping speedily from mystic spheres. The girls resettled the folds in their dresses, exchanged blue-eyed glances and snatches of schoolgirl slang; for over a month, ever since the “riots” of the Fourth of April, they had been home for safety’s sake from their convent, and regretting the canopied dormitories and collective coziness of the Holy Redeemer. The boys were already scuffling with each other for possession of a medal of San Francesco di Paola; the eldest, the heir, the young Duke Paolo, was longing to smoke and, afraid of doing so in his parents’ presence, was fondling the outside of his pocket in which lurked a braided-straw cigar case. His gaunt face was veiled in brooding melancholy it had been a bad day: Guiscard, his Irish sorrel, had seemed off form, and Fanny had apparently been unable (or unwilling) to send him her usual lilac-tinted billet-doux. Of what avail then, to him, was the Incarnation of his Savior?
Restless and domineering, the Princess dropped her rosary brusquely into her jet-fringed bag, while her fine crazy eyes glanced around at her slaves of children and her tyrant of a husband, over whom her diminutive body vainly yearned for loving dominion.
Meanwhile he himself, the Prince, had risen to his feet; the sudden movement of his huge frame made the floor tremble, and a glint of pride flashed in his light blue eyes at this fleeting confirmation of his lordship over both human beings and their works.
Now he was settling the huge scarlet missal on the chair which had been in front of him during his recitation of the Rosary, putting back the handkerchief on which he had been kneeling, and a touch of irritation clouded his brow as his eye fell on a tiny coffee stain which had had the presumption, since that morning, to fleck the vast white expanse of his waistcoat.
Not that he was fat; just very large and very strong; in houses inhabited by common mortals his head would touch the lowest rosette on the chandeliers; his fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper; and there was constant coming and going between Villa Salina and a silversmith’s for the mending of forks and spoons which, in some fit of controlled rage at table, he had coiled into a hoop. But those fingers could also stroke and handle with the most exquisite delicacy, as his wife Maria Stella knew only too well; and up in his private observatory at the top of the house the gleaming screws, caps, and studs of the telescopes, lenses, and “comet-finders” would answer to his lightest touch.
The rays of the westering sun, still high on that May afternoon, lit up the Prince’s rosy skin and honey-colored hair; these betrayed the German origin of his mother, the Princess Carolina, whose haughtiness had frozen the easygoing Court of the Two Sicilies thirty years before. But 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.
In a family which for centuries had been incapable even of adding up their own expenditures and subtracting their own debts he was the first (and last) to have a genuine bent for mathematics; this he had applied to astronomy, and by his work gained a certain official recognition and a great deal of personal pleasure. In his mind, now, pride and mathematical analysis were so linked as to give him an illusion that the stars obeyed his calculations too (as, in fact, they seemed to be doing) and that the two small planets which he had discovered (“Salina” and “Speedy” he had called them, after his main estate and a shooting dog he had been particularly fond of) would spread the fame of his family through the empty spaces between Mars and Jupiter, thus transforming the frescoes in the villa from the adulatory to the prophetic.
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.
That half hour between Rosary and dinner was one of the least irritating moments of his day, and for hours beforehand he would savor its rather uncertain calm.
Product details
- ASIN : B00F8F0KAM
- Publisher : Pantheon; Reprint edition (October 2, 2013)
- Publication date : October 2, 2013
- Language : English
- File size : 1584 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 338 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,386 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #10 in Historical European Fiction
- #21 in Classic American Literature
- #45 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
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There are much worse ways to spend a year of your life than by becoming a diligent student of the Mediterranean. You would want to read deeply in Homer’s “Iliad” and Virgil’s “Aeneid” if you have a taste for antiquity; perhaps Suetonius’ “Twelve Caesaras” if you want a rollicking but trashy and contemporary history. And you would read Paul Theroux if your taste runs more to modernity, and “The Alexandrian Quartet” of Durell, the (relatively) modern Greek poems of Cavafy, Paul Bowles for North Africa, and so on. For Southern Italy, Levis’ “Christ Stopped at Eboli”, and for Sicily, certainly Di Lampedusa’s “Leopard”.
“The Leopard’s” cast of characters is rich and legendary. Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, is an autocratic and blustery voluptuary, but he is also a dreamer and an accomplished astronomer whose world of wealth and privilege he can see coming to an end in the modern times. He is impossibly haughty but also surprisingly tender and sentimental. Father Pirrone is devout and precise, an unyielding advocate for the Church and its teachings and privileges, who is regularly humiliated by the Prince in having to accompany him to Palermo on adulterous business. Tancredi is the adopted ward and favorite of the Prince, who prefers him to his biological children; he is a hopeless romantic and an enthusiast for revolution and for sweeping away altogether the old order that feeds and shelters him. Princess Stella, the wife of the Prince, is brittle, long-suffering, devout and devoted to her eccentric husband and her rather vapid children. Paolo is the Prince’s son and heir, and is naturally and painfully jealous of his father’s preferment of Paolo.
The voluptuousness, the richness of life, the fantastic ease of corruption and vice, the sensuousness of the food, the sea, the beautiful landscape and even the overwhelming an enervating heat of the Mediterranean sun, all combine to brew an astonishing human stew. It has been regularly and brilliantly written about by novelists and poets – see especially Cavafy, Bowles and Durrell, mentioned above. This book describes the end of the Italian feudal era, beginning with the Italian Resorgimento in the late 19th Century. The warrior Garibaldi and his Red Shirts sweep southward through the Italian peninsula and finally land in Sicily. Chaos ensues, and Palermo falls. The Prince and his family retreat to his country estate in the hills, where they are protected by Tancredi’s revolutionist connections. The Prince’s daughter Concetta loves Tancredi, but he is smitten by the ravishing and wealthy Angelica, so Concetta is furious. The plot begins to play like a Verdi opera, but with wonderfully sly humor, always dry and shrewd, and staying well away from melodrama.
The novel borrows from the historical drama of Stendahl and the emotionalism of Flaubert, and gives them a modern Italian gloss of irony and humor. It was written in in the middle of the last century, after the Second World War, and published just after the author’s death; it was his only book. But just listen to this wonderfully evocative prose, describing for example the Sicilian dawn: “Venus still glimmered, a peeled grape, damp and transparent, but you could already hear the rumple of the solar chariot climbing the last slope below the horizon; soon they would meet the first flocks moving toward them torpid as tides…” Two passages merit special attention. The first is in chapter 5, two-thirds of the way through the book, where Father Pirrone delivers a surprisingly brilliant monologue and goes on to defuse an alarming family bombshell with great finesse. The second is chapter 7, “The Death of a Prince”, which wonderfully and with humane sympathy tells of Don Fabrizio’s final hours.
This is not only a great novel but an important work of literature and is worthy of a larger audience of serious readers.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, a prince in his own right, wrote this book when he was well into his fifties; he had survived World War II, and was now facing similar changes in Italy as the Don Fabrizio faced in Sicily. The story, at times, is actually a pretty brutal read. My familiarity of Italian politics and history is quite little, I’m sad to say, but it never really detracts from the pretty sweeping thrill of political change and revolution. The prince who is seeing his power and class weaken by the day in 1860’s Italy, is desperate to continue his decadent life of luxury that is believed to be God-given. His appetites are the epitome of 19th century aristocracy with his sexual escapes and monstrous mansions, but he is soon brought face-to-face with the new face of the republic. Don Calogero represents the upstart middle-class filth that is quickly ascending up Italy’s social ladder, and he sees fit to have his beautiful daughter, Angelica marry Prince Fabrizio’s penniless nephew Tancredi. This is disastrous for the Prince to imagine, but it helps his family and his place in changing shape of Italian society.
The book keeps a steady pace about daily life and desires, and does a terrific job with bringing certain elements like the garden and church to the reader’s forefront. The problem with the book, to me, is that it has a tendency to go to deep into mundane daily rituals; for every breathtaking scene of political intrigue and suspense, there are too many scenes of the Prince reminiscing about old sexual flames and lost virility. Also there is the problem of taking the liberty that the majority of people have at least a working knowledge of Italian politics. I mean, the book refers constantly to Garibaldi and his revolution, but never explains who the heck this guy is. These issues never completely destroy the flow of the book, however, but they do enough to make it seem really dry in certain stretches.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the mystique and change of the 19th century, or also to anyone who has affection for Italian unification stories. I for one found some of the political stories to be quite intriguing, and can speak highly of the quality of the book’s detail.
The story line follows the ending days of a Sicilian "Don" and his time period during the onsalught of the "Italian unification" (Risorgimento)which was basically forced upon the Sicilians by Garabaldi in the 1860's.
The authors descriptions of the lifestyles of those, rich and poor was extremely descriptive, and of course interesting. However, somewhere along the line, my interest in the story faded like the world around Don Fabrizio.
The story of Don Vito Corleone in the "Godfather" seems to paralell the same basic familial structure of wife, daughters, and sons (however,not in the Gangster sense).
Don Fabrizio eventually realizes that the times are quickly changing as is his power, and yet...there is nothing to do but accept it.
Perhaps, I am not Sicilian enough to have appreciated the true message and story line quality of this book, but, "The Leopard" just seemed to loose it's spots for me.