The Siren & Selected Writings [Paperback]

Consider this book as a "Lampedusa Miscellany" or a 'literary remains' of the great man. "The Leopard" was his only completed novel, so if you loved that and were left wanting more, there's plenty to delight and to admire here, a mixed volume of fiction, memoirs and criticism.

If "The Leopard" is a book that opens a window on the world of Sicily and its aristocracy, then this volume sheds light on the inner workings of a particular Sicilian aristocrat. Let's start with the fiction. "The Siren" is an intriguing story, charting the friendship of a world-weary younger man and an older professor. The professor tells his new friend the story of a remarkable romance in his youth, one which changed his life and influenced him even to the end of his days. This is a quite original story, which, if it can be compared to anything in contemporary fiction, is similar in tone and approach to the South American magic realists. Really though, the author is reaching back into the classical vein of storytelling, where gods and immortals interact with men. It can be read as a fable, but it is just as easily read at face value as a haunting, melancholy tale of love, loss, age and passion. It's quite different to "The Leopard" and indicates that Lampedusa was not just a one trick pony. His story "Joy and the Law", otherwise hard to track down, is similarly a delight.

Unfortunately the extract from "The Blind Kittens", which deals with Sicily some decades on from "The Leopard", and which was to be its successor as a novel, doesn't have the grace and ease of the earlier work. However, we must remember that Lampedusa was an ill man when working on it, and it's really only a draft of chapter one. It's not a bad piece of work; it just suffers by comparison with a greater one. However, it continues in the vein of the author commenting on the his fellow Sicilians, and echoes some of "The Leopard's" wry and resigned descritptions of his countrymen and their character.

"Places of my Infancy" is a series of glimpses into the places of Lampedusa's youth. Published here in augmented form, they will be a delight to read even to those familiar with this work. It was these fragments which got him going as a writer and ultimately led to "The Leopard", and it's refreshing to hear Lampedusa in his own voice revisiting the "land of lost content" to conjure up images of his youth.

Of most interest to anyone who is familiar with the above writings will be the notes on literature published here. Lampedusa was formidably well read and loved English literature most of all. This book includes his reflections on key english literary works. I don't go out of my way to read literary criticism, but I enjoyed reading this section of the book, finding it refreshing to get a non-english perspective on writers and writing we think we know so well based on our own received national opinions and assumptions. We also get his perceptive notes on Stendhal for good measure- quite hard to track down in english translation up to now- which I guarantee will make you want to look (or look again) into the Frenchman's work.

The introduction by Lampedusa's biographer, David Gilmour, is typically insightful, so all in all this is book is a delight. If ever a novel left me wanting to read more of the author's work it is "The Leopard". Of course, the sad irony of Lampedusa's life is that lung cancer took him just as he was getting going as a writer. While there's not as much in this book as we would all like, what little writing he left and which is collected here should be cherished.