Very well crafted tale of the end of Italian aristocracy, democratization and unification of Italy, although democracy and unity seemed still off somewhere on the horizon. As with English stories, you get the sense of honor and good breeding that the aristocrats have in their favor vs. the vulgarity and avarice of new wealth. The style of writing and the characters described are totally unlike any I've read before. The characters especially are very much Italian, or perhaps very much Sicilian, and thus gives a unique color and flavor (so to speak) to the reading. I liked it a lot. ( )

Somewhat overshadowed by its (excellent) filmic adaptation, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 20th-century classic is a probing examination of class politics and the interminable dance of history. The only novel from the last Prince of Lampedusa, every page of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is steeped in the slow downfall of a dying aristocracy told from within. The book surpasses many a more famous work in its delicacy and artfulness, a work both timely and timeless and a piercing meditation on change, power and mortality.

Focusing on Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, his family, and their entourage, The Leopard is a story of epic proportions spanning fifty years told through eight vignettes of their aristocratic life. Beginning during 1860 in the middle of the Risorgimento (the unification of Italy spanning 1848–71), the societal turbulence engulfing Sicily is revealed piecemeal in the shifting conversations that span the book.

Unignorably political, the story is one of the differing approaches of the aristocracy to their changing place in society and the ultimate futility of resistance to the tide of history. And as the book progresses, the Corbera family is faced with their decline as aristocrats as well as the emergence of the bourgeoisie and how to treat their eventual usurpers. It is a world described richly by di Lampedusa, a world he evidently knew well not only in its physical minutiae and social customs but also the underlying feeling of decay that accompanies them; his palace having been destroyed in1943 during the Allied invasion of Sicily, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was the last to use the princely title. Throughout the novel’s balls, dinners and hunting parties permeates a sense of their imminent end, a sense perfectly realised by a master prosist.

Not as immediately obvious but by no means less significant is the book’s parallel discussion of death. Mirroring the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy is the decline of the titular prince himself, a decline which catalyses an introspective reflection on his own morality and on the inevitability of his own mortality. Revealed in the novel’s quieter moments and in the quiet pauses of its great events, Don Fabrizio Corbera and his meditations are a masterfully executed example of a slow awakening and a challenge to the reader to (re-)consider their own lives and actions.

As already mentioned, The Leopard is a slow waltz of a novel, spanning decades and generations. Part of di Lampedusa’s genius is his dividing of the novel into eight chapters all recounting short periods of time, at most a day, in the life of the Corbera family; by doing so, he gives a sense of epic scope in the span of around 300 pages. The book deftly reveals its development through the changing of attitudes and actions over a lifetime, eschewing forced melodrama for gradual metamorphosis and ellipsis. By doing so, the work becomes one of the great novels about history that, more than simply recounting a significant event or evoking a singular time period, measures the very heartbeat of history, cyclical and interminable; the only other works that compare to it in this regard are Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.

The Leopard is a book ponderous and majestic, but also of a lightness which marks it as a work of immense skill. Di Lampedusa, a true yet self-aware aristocrat, infuses his writing and his protagonist with a sense of cynical humour which derides the vain excesses of its characters and their apparent blindness to their own demise. Unavoidably linked to the aristocracy’s decline, the sardonic insights peppered throughout the novel prevent it from veering into self-indulgent melodrama, a sure trap for many a lesser writer. But the humour is also appropriately sparse, allowing for the perceived nobility of the nobility to manifest and preventing an unwelcome anachronistic ridicule from dominating the novel. Perfectly balanced, di Lampedusa allows the novel’s true tragedy to shine through while neither trivialising nor overdramatising it.

Martin Scorsese said of the book’s filmic adaptation “Time itself is the protagonist of The Leopard: the cosmic scale of time, of centuries and epochs, on which the prince muses; Sicilian time, in which days and nights stretch to infinity; and aristocratic time, in which nothing is ever rushed and everything happens just as it should happen, as it has always happened.” He is right; the story of The Leopard is that of history, its cycle of triumphs and defeats, and the eventual passing of all earthly powers. But it is also a highly personal story of a man confronting the end of his own existence, a reckoning with all he has done with the knowledge that soon he will be unable to repair any of it, a surrendering to time’s forces which unites the two thematic threads of the work — a true masterpiece.

P.S. Visconti’s film is a faithful and worthy adaptation of the book, one fully worth investigating. Its 70mm images are sumptuously frame-worthy (recalling Bondarchuk’s great War and Peace), and the story’s characters well-realised. The only aspect of the book that is lost in translation is the humour, which resided mostly in the prince’s internal monologue and thus found little room in the film. But that is a minor complaint; both versions are well worth one’s time.

I first read [b:The Leopard|625094|The Leopard|Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1376481466s/625094.jpg|1132275] written by the wealthy Sicilian prince, Giuseppe Tomasi, Principe di Lampedusa (1896-1957), forty odd years ago and with age, my reaction has changed a bit. While I still appreciate the beautiful quality of the writing, the pace and the characterizations, I now relate more to the Prince and his thoughts about aging and change and history. He is melancholic, weary, cruel, yet still proud and elegant and seems to understand his situation. His once solidly exalted position as a nobleman is slipping away with Garabaldi's destruction of the Bourbon monarchy and he knows it. He is dying, as is his way of life, and he views his demise as consolation. He meets his nephew’s future father-in-law, the nouveau riche Don Calogero, with equanimity:

"Many problems that had seemed insoluble to the Prince were resolved in a trice by Don Calogero […] he moved through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed."

So many of the descriptions of the Prince, his courtesy, his lust, his confidence and complexity; the elaborate food served and those who devour it at his palace; the personalities of the characters, the servile but intelligent priest, the stalwart hunting companion, the whining wife, the proud, pious daughters, all seem to represent some aspect of Sicily or depict facets of the Sicilian character (which I’m so well positioned to comment on after a 3-week trip to Sicily last month! Not.) As the Prince says of his country when offered a position in the government,

"For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that of we could call our own. […] I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault.
This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind."
As the book moves forward to the ball and the Prince observes those around him, he acknowledges the excess of his class, the inbreeding observed in the silly women at the party exclaiming “Maria.” He is calm and resolute. It is a well-drawn portrait of a complex man at a crucial time in Sicilian history.
( )

"Everything must change so that everything may stay the same"

This is the way the young Prince of Salina justifies to his father his will to collaborate with the Savoia monarchy, the Italian unifiers who are seen by Sicilian landlord nobles as usurpers of their power. This phrase has become famous as a synthesis of the reaction of Sicilian landlord nobility culture to the Unification of Italy under the Northern Italy's Savoia family.
Stimulated by a discussion with another reader, I decided to post this brief comment on this very important novel, published posthumous in 1958.
Italy unification and the "Southern Issues" are a complicated matter, and this novel gives an enlighting insight on the way the powers-that-be in XIX Century Sicily managed to stay at their place while compromising with the newcomers. Please be reminded that these landlords were the ones who encouraged and used mafia bands to counteract farmers' revolts, so empowering them and legitimating them. The new State was responsible too, abandoning the South to landlords and mafia as long as its economy was exploitable by Italian economy, as well as by its former rulers. But this is another story, and it will have to be told another time.
This is only one aspect of this multi-faceted, magnificent piece of narrative. I write twenty years after my last reading, which means that I am probably missing many of the aspects I should discuss. Let's say this review is a teaser for comments.
I only would like to add a little prayer. Please spare me comments on sexism and mysoginy. It's a historical novel about Sicilian noble people in the XIX Century. No country for feminism out there at that time (the condition of the woman in Southern Italy is still a matter of vivacious debate, guess what it was like 150 years ago). So, if you don't like Prince of Salina's attitude about women, I'll confess you something: I don't, either. Do you think the author did? Well. I would not say so. But there is something called historic frame, and this is what this novel is all about. He had never seen his wife's navel, he went to brothels, he was sexist. Welcome to the real world.

If you want a powerful woman's character in Sicilian history, and based on a real person, read [b:La rivoluzione della luna|17564412|La rivoluzione della luna|Andrea Camilleri|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1362748582s/17564412.jpg|24498148]. Hilarious and reliable. Not as huge a masterpiece as Il Gattopardo, but very enjoyable, by the Sicilian author of Commissar Salvo Montalbano stories. ( )

A beautifully crafted poetic work that portrays the noble passage of a powerful Sicilian to a state of powerlessness. I do so miss these characters! ( )