Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957)

I first read [b:The Leopard|625094|The Leopard|Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1376481466s/625094.jpg|1132275] written by the wealthy Sicilian prince, Giuseppe Tomasi, Principe di Lampedusa (1896-1957), forty odd years ago and with age, my reaction has changed a bit. While I still appreciate the beautiful quality of the writing, the pace and the characterizations, I now relate more to the Prince and his thoughts about aging and change and history. He is show more melancholic, weary, cruel, yet still proud and elegant and seems to understand his situation. His once solidly exalted position as a nobleman is slipping away with Garabaldi's destruction of the Bourbon monarchy and he knows it. He is dying, as is his way of life, and he views his demise as consolation. He meets his nephew’s future father-in-law, the nouveau riche Don Calogero, with equanimity:

"Many problems that had seemed insoluble to the Prince were resolved in a trice by Don Calogero […] he moved through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed."

So many of the descriptions of the Prince, his courtesy, his lust, his confidence and complexity; the elaborate food served and those who devour it at his palace; the personalities of the characters, the servile but intelligent priest, the stalwart hunting companion, the whining wife, the proud, pious daughters, all seem to represent some aspect of Sicily or depict facets of the Sicilian character (which I’m so well positioned to comment on after a 3-week trip to Sicily last month! Not.) As the Prince says of his country when offered a position in the government,

"For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that of we could call our own. […] I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault.
This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind."
As the book moves forward to the ball and the Prince observes those around him, he acknowledges the excess of his class, the inbreeding observed in the silly women at the party exclaiming “Maria.” He is calm and resolute. It is a well-drawn portrait of a complex man at a crucial time in Sicilian history. show less

Somewhat overshadowed by its (excellent) filmic adaptation, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 20th-century classic is a probing examination of class politics and the interminable dance of history. The only novel from the last Prince of Lampedusa, every page of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is steeped in the slow downfall of a dying aristocracy told from within. The book surpasses many a more famous work in its delicacy and artfulness, a work both timely and timeless and a piercing meditation on show more change, power and mortality.

Focusing on Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, his family, and their entourage, The Leopard is a story of epic proportions spanning fifty years told through eight vignettes of their aristocratic life. Beginning during 1860 in the middle of the Risorgimento (the unification of Italy spanning 1848–71), the societal turbulence engulfing Sicily is revealed piecemeal in the shifting conversations that span the book.

Unignorably political, the story is one of the differing approaches of the aristocracy to their changing place in society and the ultimate futility of resistance to the tide of history. And as the book progresses, the Corbera family is faced with their decline as aristocrats as well as the emergence of the bourgeoisie and how to treat their eventual usurpers. It is a world described richly by di Lampedusa, a world he evidently knew well not only in its physical minutiae and social customs but also the underlying feeling of decay that accompanies them; his palace having been destroyed in1943 during the Allied invasion of Sicily, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was the last to use the princely title. Throughout the novel’s balls, dinners and hunting parties permeates a sense of their imminent end, a sense perfectly realised by a master prosist.

Not as immediately obvious but by no means less significant is the book’s parallel discussion of death. Mirroring the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy is the decline of the titular prince himself, a decline which catalyses an introspective reflection on his own morality and on the inevitability of his own mortality. Revealed in the novel’s quieter moments and in the quiet pauses of its great events, Don Fabrizio Corbera and his meditations are a masterfully executed example of a slow awakening and a challenge to the reader to (re-)consider their own lives and actions.

As already mentioned, The Leopard is a slow waltz of a novel, spanning decades and generations. Part of di Lampedusa’s genius is his dividing of the novel into eight chapters all recounting short periods of time, at most a day, in the life of the Corbera family; by doing so, he gives a sense of epic scope in the span of around 300 pages. The book deftly reveals its development through the changing of attitudes and actions over a lifetime, eschewing forced melodrama for gradual metamorphosis and ellipsis. By doing so, the work becomes one of the great novels about history that, more than simply recounting a significant event or evoking a singular time period, measures the very heartbeat of history, cyclical and interminable; the only other works that compare to it in this regard are Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.

The Leopard is a book ponderous and majestic, but also of a lightness which marks it as a work of immense skill. Di Lampedusa, a true yet self-aware aristocrat, infuses his writing and his protagonist with a sense of cynical humour which derides the vain excesses of its characters and their apparent blindness to their own demise. Unavoidably linked to the aristocracy’s decline, the sardonic insights peppered throughout the novel prevent it from veering into self-indulgent melodrama, a sure trap for many a lesser writer. But the humour is also appropriately sparse, allowing for the perceived nobility of the nobility to manifest and preventing an unwelcome anachronistic ridicule from dominating the novel. Perfectly balanced, di Lampedusa allows the novel’s true tragedy to shine through while neither trivialising nor overdramatising it.

Martin Scorsese said of the book’s filmic adaptation “Time itself is the protagonist of The Leopard: the cosmic scale of time, of centuries and epochs, on which the prince muses; Sicilian time, in which days and nights stretch to infinity; and aristocratic time, in which nothing is ever rushed and everything happens just as it should happen, as it has always happened.” He is right; the story of The Leopard is that of history, its cycle of triumphs and defeats, and the eventual passing of all earthly powers. But it is also a highly personal story of a man confronting the end of his own existence, a reckoning with all he has done with the knowledge that soon he will be unable to repair any of it, a surrendering to time’s forces which unites the two thematic threads of the work — a true masterpiece.

P.S. Visconti’s film is a faithful and worthy adaptation of the book, one fully worth investigating. Its 70mm images are sumptuously frame-worthy (recalling Bondarchuk’s great War and Peace), and the story’s characters well-realised. The only aspect of the book that is lost in translation is the humour, which resided mostly in the prince’s internal monologue and thus found little room in the film. But that is a minor complaint; both versions are well worth one’s time. show less

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 show more 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! show less

So this is basically Withnail and I in Italian, right? Except with a slightly less sympathetic time to be nostalgic about, if your grace permits me saying so.

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Det är rätt länge sen nu som jag såg Luchino Viscontis filmatisering av Leoparden. Jag minns mest ett mäktigt kostymdrama, stora balsalar, grönskande italienska dalar där en nästan känner doften av olivlundar, rika människor som gnäller över att de snart inte är lika rika längre.

Att Lampedusas förlaga nu kommer i show more nyöversättning, och en oerhört lyxig och påkostad sådan dessutom, känns lite tidstypiskt på något vis. Romanen börjar 1860 på Sicilien, och där ska den också förbli även om tiden går. Garibaldis rödskjortor har precis landstigit utanför Palermo i sin kamp för ett enat sekulärt Italien i stället för alla de katolska småkungadömen och republiker det varit i sekler, och i sitt palats sitter don Fabrizio, prinsen av Salina, och inser att tidens vingslag är för tunga för att inte vika sig för. ”Om allt ska förbli som det är måste vi ändra allt”, säger hans systerson åt honom innan han drar upp i bergen för att kämpa med revolutionärerna och mot den ordning som gynnat hans familj i generationer, för framtidens skull. Men finns det någon framtid?

Detta mynnar sedan ut i ett storslaget porträtt av en tid som författaren och läsaren vet är dödsdömd. Genom familjen Salinas ögon får vi följa en förändring som hade verkat omöjlig innan, så rikt (pun intended) och detaljerat beskriven, hela vägen ner till dammlagret på de gamla porträtten i palatsrum som inte används längre, att känslan av något ruttet bara skiner igenom gradvis. Don Fabrizio håller god min medan han försöker rädda vad som räddas kan av traditioner, inflytande och ansvar medan det blir alltmer uppenbart att framtiden tillhör vulgära småborgare som familjen Sedára, som tror sig kunna bli adliga genom ett stycke papper. Om han bara kan bygga upp sin systerson till en framtidens man med rätt idéer, hitta ett lämpligt parti åt honom, slippa att själv behöva förändras mer än absolut nödvändigt innan sin ofrånkomliga död…

Jo, Leoparden känns bitvis mer än lite reaktionär, nostalgisk för en tid då alla Visste Sin Plats; de vackra men inte speciellt intelligenta kvinnorna på sin, de tacksamma okunniga bönderna på sin, Gud och kyrkan på sin, och Adeln överst med ett strängt men välvilligt leende. Inte för att don Fabrizio har några illusioner om att adeln behövs på samma sätt som den en gång gjorde; hela det gamla feodala samhället sköts ju i sank av Napoleon, och adeln fyller nu egentligen ingen annan funktion än att föregå med gott moraliskt exempel (trots att don Fabrizio är helt öppen med sina unga älskarinnor), upprätthålla någon form av nationell stolthet (trots att namnet på nationen bytts ut med jämna mellanrum sedan de gamla grekerna) och bestämma över småfolket som inte vet sitt eget bästa. Då och då får vi veta vad som ska hända framöver, till och med exakt när bomber byggda i Pittsburgh kommer att utplåna palatsen som då sedan länge förlorat makten till kortsiktiga amatörer som bara bryr sig om att blidka pöbeln för egen vinning. Boken är ju skriven på 50-talet, och vi vet ju vart utvecklingen ledde under 1900-talets första halva i Italien. Elefanten i rummet, här precis som i Umberto Ecos sista bok från i fjol, heter Mussolini, kulmen av den nya tidens politiker, den mest mardrömslika slutsatsen av liberalimens nödvändiga idéer, en återvändsgränd för framgångstanken som nu är populär igen.

För ögonblicket, tack vare er ödmjuke tjänare i viss mån, talar man inte längre om rödskjortorna, men det kommer man att göra. När de har försvunnit, så kommer det andra i en annan färg: och sedan kommer de röda igen. Och hur kommer det att sluta?

Leoparden är en roman som prunkar, så full med mångsidiga personporträtt, torr humor och nostalgiporr att motsägelserna, mörkret i den kan läsas på många sätt; en roman att sjunka in i, förlora sig i som en myllrande renässanstavla så att en bara då och då upptäcker att en inte får syre. Bonniers nyutgåva känns på många sätt som ett stycke nostalgi i sig, Viveca Melanders magnifika översättning parad med så många fotnötter, kritiska kommentarer och fragment och noveller ur Lampedusas övriga produktion, att den verkar vilja skrika att detta är Stor Litteratur av ett slag som inte skrivs längre. På gott och ont stämmer det kanske.

Efter att jag läst ut boken ser jag om Viscontis film. Den är bättre än jag minns den, och fungerar lika väl som en kommentar på romanen. Han lägger till ett lager av ironi, av medvetenhet om dem som gjorde den Gamla Goda Tiden möjlig, låter kameran dröja på kammarjungfrun som placerar ut pottan. Där Lampedusa har en tendens att skriva läsaren på näsan om hur allt kommer att gå åt helvete när man ger makten till en okultiverad pöbel slutar filmen med konstaterandet ”En rejäl armé, det var det vi behövde på Sicilien. Nu blir allt bra.” Revolution betyder cirkel, och det enda som vi lär oss av historien, etc… show less