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The Melancholia of a Departing Age
Oct 2011
The Leopard - Tomasi Di Lampedusa - Vintage Classics, 2007
* * * *
This is a one-book wonder. It was written in the 1950s by the last in a line of minor Italian princes and was never published during his lifetime. It is set chiefly during the Risorgimento and the main character is a thinly fictionalised portrait of the author’s great grandfather, but it is actually about the fading into irrelevance of people, ideas and social institutions with the passage of time. It is one long dying fall. It is, in short, the ultimate fin de siècle novel.
The setting is western Sicily where Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Leopard of the title, is nominal ruler. In fact power is shifting after Garibaldi’s successful invasion of the island in 1860, a fact of which Fabrizio is well aware but about which he feels powerless to do anything. His young and charming but flighty nephew Tancredi has sided with the new order by joining Garibaldi’s red shirts and falling in love with a commoner, even though he is a scion of the ancien regime. Fabrizio's priest, Father Pirrone, does not approve, and his great dane, Bendico, does not care. His wife, the princess Stella Maria, is lost to religion, and his daughters must be kept in line.
There is little plot as such - instead, each chapter is a self-contained episode in which more traditions are lost and the new pushes out the old. The pleasure of the tale comes from the way that the theme is hinted at through seemingly incidental details and Lampedusa’s arch, ironic and observant style. An example:
“Soon after appeared Russo, whom the Prince found the most significant of his dependants. Clever, dressed rather smartly in a striped velvet jacket, with greedy eyes below a remorseless forehead, the Prince found him a perfect specimen of a class on its way up. He was obsequious too, and even sincerely friendly in a way, for his cheating was done in the certainty of exercising a right.” (p 23)
The dry wit of the writing allows the theme to creep up on the reader and charges the later chapters with a powerful melancholia, including a bleak and convincing depiction of the last moments of a dying man. This is a story that benefits from being told quietly. It has a few flaws (none of the female characters are particularly noticeable or convincing, except in the final chapter) and ultimately it is a conservative’s wail of disappointment that things cannot stay the same, but it is very well done.
The Leopard - Tomasi Di Lampedusa - Vintage Classics, 2007
* * * *
This is a one-book wonder. It was written in the 1950s by the last in a line of minor Italian princes and was never published during his lifetime. It is set chiefly during the Risorgimento and the main character is a thinly fictionalised portrait of the author’s great grandfather, but it is actually about the fading into irrelevance of people, ideas and social institutions with the passage of time. It is one long dying fall. It is, in short, the ultimate fin de siècle novel.
The setting is western Sicily where Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Leopard of the title, is nominal ruler. In fact power is shifting after Garibaldi’s successful invasion of the island in 1860, a fact of which Fabrizio is well aware but about which he feels powerless to do anything. His young and charming but flighty nephew Tancredi has sided with the new order by joining Garibaldi’s red shirts and falling in love with a commoner, even though he is a scion of the ancien regime. Fabrizio's priest, Father Pirrone, does not approve, and his great dane, Bendico, does not care. His wife, the princess Stella Maria, is lost to religion, and his daughters must be kept in line.
There is little plot as such - instead, each chapter is a self-contained episode in which more traditions are lost and the new pushes out the old. The pleasure of the tale comes from the way that the theme is hinted at through seemingly incidental details and Lampedusa’s arch, ironic and observant style. An example:
“Soon after appeared Russo, whom the Prince found the most significant of his dependants. Clever, dressed rather smartly in a striped velvet jacket, with greedy eyes below a remorseless forehead, the Prince found him a perfect specimen of a class on its way up. He was obsequious too, and even sincerely friendly in a way, for his cheating was done in the certainty of exercising a right.” (p 23)
The dry wit of the writing allows the theme to creep up on the reader and charges the later chapters with a powerful melancholia, including a bleak and convincing depiction of the last moments of a dying man. This is a story that benefits from being told quietly. It has a few flaws (none of the female characters are particularly noticeable or convincing, except in the final chapter) and ultimately it is a conservative’s wail of disappointment that things cannot stay the same, but it is very well done.
no subject
I don't know whether it is significant that the original title is "il Gattopardo", actually refers to a serval ('leopard' is 'pardo'). So really it's talking about a small, leopard-like cat...not quite a leopard - maybe correct for a princeling?