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Loading... The Leopard (original 1958; edition 1991)by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Work InformationThe Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958)
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A beautifully crafted poetic work that portrays the noble passage of a powerful Sicilian to a state of powerlessness. I do so miss these characters! ( ) I picked up this book for free as a local library discard. I recognised the title, but knew little of the book. And what a pleasant surprise! A very readable account of a different era and different people. Written by the last of a long line of Sicilian nobility in the 1950s, the book tells of the decline of Sicilian nobility in the 1860s at the time of the unification of Italy. Gently written, but with plenty of barbs hidden in plain sight, the book makes a lost time and place accessible to modern readers. I didn't really enjoy this book, but I did appreciate it more after discussing it at book group with other people who loved it. I think its a bit 'men's fiction' with the female characters a bit flimsy a lot of the time, but actually the way it shows the decline of the aristocracy in Italy is pretty interesting, and I did more enjoy the final chapter with the old ladies and their relics. i was mesmerized by this novel, as i am, by habit and choice, a backward-looking human who can be startled by the long-known. also, just love a ball scene. i sat up and gasped at this passage from chapter 6 (November 1862) The ballroom was all golden: smooth on the cornices, uneven on the door frames, in a pale almost silvery design against a darker background on the door panels and on the shutters annulling the windows, thus conferring on the room the look of some superb jewel case shut off from an unworthy world...a faded gold, pale as the hair of Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten. Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo flowers in a color so faint as to seem just an ephemeral pink reflected from the chandeliers. That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio's heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway... The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers...began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943. This book belongs on any list of first (or only) novels that became classics. Not long before his death at age sixty, di Lampedusa had received its ringing rejection as unpublishable by the first publisher he'd sent it to. The story, of an 1860's Sicilian duke trying to maintain a complicated manorial and family life while obliquely facing political threats to his class during Italian unification following the Risorgimento, is more given to lush descriptions than psychological portraits or historical musings. As the sun goes down on the duke's estates, what you hear is the murmurings of guests in the garden and the clinking of glasses. There's almost a cheerfulness among the dark forebodings of the dusk.
35 livres cultes à lire au moins une fois dans sa vie Quels sont les romans qu'il faut avoir lu absolument ? Un livre culte qui transcende, fait réfléchir, frissonner, rire ou pleurer… La littérature est indéniablement créatrice d’émotions. Si vous êtes adeptes des classiques, ces titres devraient vous plaire. De temps en temps, il n'y a vraiment rien de mieux que de se poser devant un bon bouquin, et d'oublier un instant le monde réel. Mais si vous êtes une grosse lectrice ou un gros lecteur, et que vous avez épuisé le stock de votre bibliothèque personnelle, laissez-vous tenter par ces quelques classiques de la littérature. What makes The Leopard an immortal book is that it kisses perfection full on the mouth. Its major theme – the workings of mortality – is explored with an intelligence and poignancy rarely equalled and never, to my knowledge, surpassed. It is not a historical novel. It is a novel which happens to take place in history. Only once does a historical character intrude - King Bomba - and he is rapidly reduced to domestic proportions... I first read this noble book in Italian, but my knowledge of the language is too slight to enable me to judge Mr Archibald Colquhoun’s translation. It does not flow and glow like the original — how should it? — but it is sensitive and scholarly. Il Gattopardo is not like a nineteenth-century novel. It goes by much more quickly than the film and is told with an ironic tone that in the film is entirely lacking. Lampedusa’s writing is full of witty phrase and color. It belongs to the end of the century of Huysmans and D’Annunzio, both of whom, although their subjects are so different from one another, it manages to suggest at moments. There are also little patches of Proust. The rich pasta served at the family dinner and the festive refreshments at the ball are described with a splendor of language which is rarely expended on food but which is in keeping with all the rest of Lampedusa’s half-nostalgic, half-humorous picture of a declining but still feudal princely family in Sicily in the sixties of the last century. While you are reading The Leopard, and particularly while you are rereading it, you are likely to feel that it is one of the greatest novels ever written. If this sense fades as you move away from the book, it is only because one's memory cannot fully retain the pungent artfulness of Lampedusa's brilliant sentences. The Leopard is a true novel: It has a fully formed central character, a narrative thrust that keeps you reading, even a historical grounding in the events surrounding Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the creation of modern Italy. But unless you treat it essentially as a poem—unless you memorize its sentences as if they were lines by Keats, Hopkins, or Eliot (all of them, incidentally, poets whom Lampedusa adored)—the novel's power will dissipate with eerie rapidity the minute you finish reading. It is as ephemeral as the state of mind it chronicles, which is, in turn, part of a vanishing civilization, and no amount of nostalgic remembrance or effortful evocation will do it justice... When Bassani contacted the widowed Principessa of Lampedusa to see if there were any more bits of the novel available, she offered him only the chapter about a ball. ("A ball is always a good thing," Bassani agreed—and how would Visconti ever have made his movie without it?) It was not until Bassani's subsequent visit to Palermo, made specifically to ferret out any other missing pieces, that he obtained from Lanza Tomasi the full manuscript, including the chapter about the priest. Licy never did feel happy about the publication of that chapter: Apparently, Lampedusa had expressed last-minute doubts about it. But it is impossible to imagine the finished book without it, and one is grateful to Bassani for his vigorous intervention. Like so much else in the history of this novel, this story seems to demonstrate that only a nearly random process could have yielded such perfection as its endpoint. Belongs to Publisher SeriesAjalooline romaan (10. raamat) Arion Press (102) — 22 more Is contained inHas the adaptationIs abridged inHas as a reference guide/companionHas as a studyHas as a supplementHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)853.914Literature Italian Italian fiction 1900- 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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