Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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45 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Small but perfectly formed, 26 Feb 2005
I think this may be the nearest thing to a perrfect novel. It's set in Sicily around the time of the '100 days' - the beginning of Garibaldi's campaign to unite Italy (and extend the franchise along the way). The central character is an aging aristocrat. He is at once admirable, contemptible and pitiable. He is more aware than his peers that the power of his class is crumbling, along with his own previously formidable powers. His loyalty - to his family, his class, and a king whom he personally despises - dominates his actions, even while he knows the inevitability of failure. Yet his personal relations with his family are distant.The book is a great work of art. Much is understated, implied, ambiguous. The revolution has bittersweet consequences: it is obvious what was gained, but something was lost (the author was also a count). So much is said in so few words. Occasionally the peaks of human artistry inspire awe: how can a person do this? This is such a peak. Paragraphs, pages even, are perfect.
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32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A novel for all time, 1 Jun 2005
The plot in "The Leopard" spans some 50 years, from 1869 to 1910. The novel opens when the Bourbon sates of Naples and Sicily, called the kingdom of the Tow Sicilies, is about to end and the Italian peninsula is to become one state again for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. The first chapter is set in May 1860 precisely when Garibaldi arrives in Sicily from Genoa. The "Garibaldini" land in Marsala and within two weeks occupy the capital, Palermo. Gathering more volunteers, Garibaldi crosses to the mainland and defeats the Bourbon troops on the Volturno. Subsequently Garibaldi hands over southern Italy to King Victor Emmanuel and every state in the peninsula agrees to join the new united kingdom via plebiscites. Finally the revolutionary actions of the Risorgimento - the movement for unification - are ended by the Italian government troops and Rome is declared as capital of Italy in 1870.
It is against this historical background that the reader follows the life of Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, a Sicilian aristocrat who watches impassively the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance. He is no less abated by the decline of his own prestige than the numerous prancing bewhiskered stone leopards adorning his palaces. One follows his worries about daughters, dowries, political careers and religious intrigues. He submits to endless little subterfuges, he the leopard who used to sweep away effortlessly difficulties with the wave of his paw. Don Fabrizio is surrounded by a multitude of hilariously grotesque characters with whom the author casts an amused but bitter glance at the Sicilian mentality. "The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they consider they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral."
Giuseppe di Lampedusa painstakingly meditated for twenty-five years over his novel. He was sixty before he finally wrote it and he completed it a few months before his death in 1957. He was then told by an Italian editor that his novel is unpublishable!
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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Greatest Novel of the 20th Century?, 24 Jan 2005
Every once in a while you stumble upon a book so magical, so beautifully and carefully written and so engrossing that the boundaries of what you thought were great literature are so rendered pointless that you reassess your opinions on all of the books you have read before. Lampedusa's 'The Leopard' is one such book. It was on reading an interview with Martin Scorcese about the birth of the mafia in Scicily that the book was brought to my attention; it is with a huge debt of gratitude that I tracked it down and dove into its beautiful depths. Never has a book moved me and made me thirst for more as this. The central character, Fabrizio, is a masterful creation; in turns a swaggering relic of the past and pathetic and useless bulwark against the onslaught of modernity encapsulated by Garibaldi. The pathos which threads through the novel is perfectly mirrored by the knowledge that Lampedusa wrote no more than this; a tragedy, which qualifies this as the greatest novel of the 20th Century. If you love literature, life and great works of art, read this.
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