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Book Reviews - Review 52

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Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa


The Leopard

Category: Fiction | Published: 1958 | Review Added: 27-05-2004

Rating: 4 - A top read

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a Sicilian nobleman who published nothing during his lifetime, but bequeathed (among other works) this impressive novel to posterity.

The Leopard portrays the decline of a branch of the Sicilian aristocracy during the unification of Italy in the mid-19th Century. It centres around the thoughts of the generous but introspective Prince Fabrizio di Salena as he watches his heritage being written out of history, resigned to the new order but never finding a home in it.

The novel is remarkably undramatic, less a narrative than a sequence of scenes from the Salena household during this tumultuous period. Almost all the action happens, as it were, 'off-stage'. The scenes portrayed - hunting trips, dinners, visits by clerics - are used by the author to throw history into relief, suggesting through the evocation of local atmosphere and subtle symbolism the great changes taking place in the wider world.

This is a short novel but extremely dense in its description and its symbolism - not a book that can easily be digested in one sitting. It's very finely written, full of keen insights and conveying a strong sense of the atmosphere both of the eerie Sicilian landscape and of the lives of the last 'proper' Italian aristocrats. A subtly haunting work.

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