Name: The Leopard
Rating: 4.022727272727272 (22 reviews)
ISBN: 9780307833990

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

A classic of modern fiction. Set in the 1860s, THE LEOPARD is the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution.

A Novel

The Leopard

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

For better readers, this is the story of the decline of a wealthy Italian family in the time of Garibaldi.

Tim Pendry

A truly magnificent novel, appropriately regarded as a classic of not merely of Italian but of modern european literature. Where to start with the praise! Perhaps with the style which is limpid and evocative, crisp and detached, and yet able to convey emotion and feeling. But it is the content that is the core of the novel and, as so often, you have to ask not only about the ostensible period of the story but the context of the writing. This is a story written in the post-war era about the Risorgimento in Sicily – one era is reflecting the other. Di Lampedusa was a Sicilian aristocrat writing about change in his own class' status in the wake of Mussolini as Christian Democracy introduced democracy as a means of countering Communism. He does this by observing and recounting how his forebears handled the transition from the sclerotic Bourbon Monarchy to a dynamic Liberalism with a national mission. Like all great works of literature, the book works at multiple levels. It is a discreet apologia for the best in aristocratic values, a troubled critique of the claims of the rising new elite to virtue worthy of De Jouvenel and a pessimistic tribute to political pragmatism. It is, in short, about conservatism but 'bigger than that'. The subtlety lies in the author’s understanding that aristocratic power lies on very slender moral grounds. It is a cultural artifact. The aristocrat is as bound by custom and tradition as his subjects. Even religion is suspect as a special interest in its own right. What we see in the book is an almost pagan sensibility and, beyond the politics and the defence of an adaptive tradition, an almost touching account of the loss of powers of a late middle aged patriarch who has to adapt to so much that is otherwise distasteful. Patriarchalism gets a bad Press and with much justification. It is not fitted to a modernized, complex society. But Di Lampedusa moves us to some sympathy for its virtues as well as its vices where the patriarch has the well-being of an entire, sensitively-balanced, society on his shoulders. This patriarch has to deal with the inevitability of change, not just the rise of more thrusting elites where the survival of his patrimony depends on collaboration, but his own aging, loss of powers and death which seems to moves him finally beyond the Church he is obligated to uphold. At one level, we may deplore this patriarchal aristocratic culture which Di Lampedusa appears to be justifying (certainly I have no time for it) but, at another level, we have to recognize that some conservative analyses of the human condition have merit, presenting a real challenge to liberals. The Leopard is not entirely wrong in seeing the new world of liberal reform as one where the sheep lose the protection of the big cats in order to suffer the rule of predatory wolves. We know that liberal taxation and conscription will be worse than aristocratic – but that it will build roads. This is the problem of modernity. Nothing can come of nothing. The industrialization, the railways and the roads come at a price – eventually, the glorification of nationalistic war and greater pressures on the very peasantry who were supposed to be the sheep to the aristocratic big cats. ‘The Leopard’ is a great book because it deals head-on with ambiguity – an ethically intolerable system of aristocratic power had its beneficial points and its logic and, though modernity is going to be better in the long run, what replaces it has some very bad points indeed. The account of the Church is interesting – the same ambiguity. The Church is a special interest that sustains order and provides primitive welfare services. The Church eventually stabs the aging aristocratic ladies in their emotional back. Its interest is its own. In other words, what we have here is a book that accurately describes a situation without polemic, leaving us to stop and think about the inherited liberal assumptions of our culture which emerged from the destruction of the old order. It makes us ask: what was lost and what was won? It does not draw us back into that old order. This is not a polemic against progress but for adaptation. It just makes us think that the new order, whether the ridiculous liberalism of the Risorgimento or the corrupt democracy of the Christian Democrats, is not so much better. And why might this be? Why, because of a paradox. The old order survives within the new order but only by removing what was good about it and retaining what was not so good. Aristocracy was not wiped out in Italy in 1860. It adapted to modernity and it gave to get … plus ca change. The sadness here is that a ‘true’ aristocrat gives not for himself but for his patrimony and it is biology – death and lack of surviving and worthy male heirs that proves a problem here. The future for 'The Leopard' lies in his thoroughly likeable but rascally and opportunistic nephew and, somehow, what emerges is, well, not just the same. There are other reasons to read the book – descriptions of Sicily and the Sicilian people (though one is suspicious of the reliability of our narrator), the painless weaving of history into the narrative and the almost perfect creation of flesh and blood figures to represent a symbolic drama. A must-read for anyone who wants to get a feel for the transitions that took place in European culture (for this story has variants all over the Continent and in the British Isles as well) as modernisation and nationalism disrupted traditional regional cultures. A truly great book!

The Leopard is a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento. Published posthumously in 1958 by Feltrinelli, after two rejections by the leading Italian publishing houses Mondadori and Einaudi, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. In 1959, it won Italy's highest award for fiction, the Strega Prize.

I need to read it once more , and slow as hell. When I actually focused, I was swept off my feet. 

Adam Scharf

Based on the life of the author's great grandfather in the last half of the 19th century, the story trace the effect upon him of the crumbling of his feudal domain after the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy in Naples.

Jeremy Boyd

heleen de boever

Veel (mooie) woorden voor een verhaal dat me uiteindelijk weinig kon schelen.

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Edward

In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.

The Leopard A Novel

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