Book Review - The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

 The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, translated by Archibald Colquhoun

London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1960     (first published in Italian in 1958)

My wife and I recently watched the Netflix series Il Gattopardo with much enjoyment - it's well worth watching. Both of us had read the novel decades ago, and my wife is an ardent fan of the 1963 film starring Burt Lancaster. While the Netflix series is excellent - a real tour de force - we both thought that it didn't match with our memories of the book. So, I hunted out my copy and re-read it for the first time at least two decades.

What a perfect book this is - characterization, scene-setting, plot are all perfectly intertwined with the most wonderful descriptive writing about the land and people of Sicily (kudos goes to the translator here as well). Lampedusa perfectly captures not only the ennui of the Prince, with his acceptance that he is presiding over the decline of his family and the Sicilian way of life; but also the ignorant thrusting of the "new" Italy, with its plans and promises that will amount to nothing; and how money is merely transferring from one ruling caste to another. He shows us that the opportunists and the traditionalists all lose, while the plight of the poor doesn't change. Reliance on the beneficence of an aristocrat is just as precarious as relying on a government.

The sense of loss, but also of the permanence of Sicily as a place, is palpable throughout the book. As time moves on in the book we see the Prince's real sense of actual power to change things ebb away, as does his will to do anything about it. He is intelligent enough to know that the path taken by his beloved nephew Tancredi is the correct one for the new times, even as he can't bring himself personally to adapt to them - he is an aristocrat through and through, as was the author, which is why I think the passages that deal with how aristocrats lived and thought (eloquently espoused by Father Pirrone to his sleeping friend) ring so true. What was important to the Prince was important because it separated him from the common herd of Sicilians. 

The structure of the book allows the reader to become subsumed into the story - the descriptions of palaces, countryside, balls and dinners perfectly sets the scene of the end of an era, and the beginning of another. It's really one of the most perfect books that was written in the twentieth century, and I strongly suggest that if you haven't, you should! Both the film and the Netflix series are also very good, but neither are particularly faithful to the original.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell