Before the classic Italian movie “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1970), there was Di Lampedusa’s literary masterpiece, which spans the years from 1860 to 1910. It has a wistful, end-of-an-era atmosphere permeating it: the doomed aristocracy going down grandly to meet their certain demise. It’s a sort of Sicilian Downton Abbey, and you never want it to end.
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.
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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a novel that explores life after tragedy and the enduring spirit of love. | Learn more
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