October 2024. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
1958, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 307 pages. Written in Italian, read in English.
Don Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa, 12th Duke of Palma, Baron of Montechiaro, Baron of La Torretta, and Grandee of Spain of the first class; the last of his line. This is a set of titles that is a heavy burden to bare, and so it only makes sense that he sat down to rest at his desk more often than not. And having sat down, he was prone to writing. And although he spent a significant amount of his time writing, The Leopard is the only work he has ever published. He has worked on the novel since the early 1930’s, and with renewed vigour since the beginning of the 1950’s when, attending a conference with a relative who was also an aspiring writer, he has realised he can’t do worse than that relative.
The Leopard began its life as an attempt of Di Lampedusa to describe a day — a full span of twenty four hours — in the life of a Sicilian prince and his family. The novel indeed begins this way, but soon spreads out, like the concentric ripples in a body of water after a stone has been thrown into it, to additional episodes, ranging between descriptions of events that happen the same week, and events that occur years later. Because of the nature of its writing — Di Lampedusa put the business of writing the novel aside and returned to it multiple times over the span of twenty years, returning to it and finalising it eventually in 1957, very shortly before his death — the novel has the sense of a series of episodes, connected to each other only in the sense that they reflect on the same characters, and what has happened in the past to these characters affects what happens to them later.
The story of The Leopard is the story of prince Fabrizio Corbera of the Salina family, a minor prince of the two Sicilies, and his family, at a significant historical point of the risorgimento in which Garibaldi and his army have conquered Sicily and moved on to the mainland, to claim the divided principalities as a unified country for king Vittorio Emanuele II. In contrast to the political turmoil outside, life continues almost as usual for Salina and his family. He prefers his orphan nephew, Tancredi Falconeri, to his own eldest son, Francesco Paolo, because the former appears to be enterprising and express more noble tendencies, and the latter appears to be content in the idleness of his royal upbringing. Tancredi decides to join the red shirts, beginning to carve out a political future for himself in the newly formed country, and when the family travels to their estate in a coastal town, Tancredi begins courting Angelica, the daughter of the town’s mayor, in preference over Salina’s own daughter, and Salina is bound to orchestrate the courtship and marriage. Later, when Italy is unified, Don Fabrizio is asked to be come a senator on behalf of Sicily and declines.
A later chapter finds Don Fabrizio an old man on his deathbed, concerned that he is the last of his line (one of his last thoughts, “I’m seventy two years old and I’ve only fully lived one or two years”, is heartbreaking). The final chapter revisits Concetta, his eldest daughter, her two sisters and a widowed Angelica, who together try to protect their local catholic church from the changed views on religion and relics that are sweeping the country.
Di Lampedusa has based the narrative and the main character of prince Salina on his own great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, and many of the other characters are based on other, more recent relatives of his — as he reveals in a lengthy letter that is added as a preface to the version of the novel that I’ve read. He concedes that the main character is an amalgam of his grand-grandfather and he himself, but it is difficult to determine whether Di Lampedusa considered the historical context of the novel he has written a reflection of the turmoil that his family, and his country, were going through at the time — he initially symphatized with the fascists but did not care much for Mussolini, and when the fascists came to power, he has sensibly removed himself from Italy for almost the full duration of Mussolini’s reign.
When he finished the novel, and after two earlier, unsuccessful attempts to secure publishing for it, he had left instructions in his will that his family continue to try and publish the book, enclosed in multiple notebooks, but that they should not reduce themselves to paying for it. Eventually a publishing house was found, and the novel was placed in the hands of Giorgio Bassani (author of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis”) as editor. A debate has ensued and continues to this day among the factions who care about these sort of things, how much of the final novel is actually taken from the source notebooks and how much has been embellished by Bassani — but the result, however it has been achieved, is uncontested — and the only novel that Di Lampedusa has written in his lifteime, and was only published after his death, has become the best selling in Italian history.
The November 2024 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be McTeague by Frank Norris
