Word: fabrizio
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...written by 75-year-old Alberto Denti di Pirajno, Duke of Pirajno. The resemblances between the two novels do not end there. They are both set in the 19th century amid the first revolutionary stirrings of Italian unification. To match The Leopard's feudally lavish autocratic hero, Don Fabrizio, there is the new book's feudally parsimonious autocratic heroine, Ippolita. Both books share the style of an ironic, sometimes witty guided tour through a family album. Lampedusa was the greater craftsman and the subtler artist. Where The Leopard became an elegy for an aristocratic way of life, Ippolita...
...Fabrizio obviously does not know that Clara is mentally deficient, but there is no doubting his or his family's seriousness. Mrs. Johnson's dilemma is simple but terrible. Shall she explain and take her daughter away from disturbing Florence, or shall she give her daughter the chance at a normal woman's life that she will never get back home? In one moving moment she realizes that Clara, "whether she could do long division or not, was a woman...
...wily old civilization sets a question afloat: Is Clara a virgin? Money is vaguely but obviously to be considered: What dowry? To Clara's mother, all this is evidence of deep, cultural differences: "It's simply that they are facing what I am hiding from." And Fabrizio's father, devoted though he is to his fat, pious wife, is unmistakably attracted to Mrs. Johnson. Italian practicality, ruthlessness, an odd breed of unblinkered humaneness, scrapes blatantly against U.S. generosity and naivet...
...Garibaldini." unlike the stars, will not keep their distance. When his dashing nephew Tancredi joins the revolutionary redshirts, Don Fabrizio is forced to applaud the boy's dry, foxy reasoning: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." As his next tactic for keeping things as they are by changing them, Tancredi stoops beneath his class to conquer Angelica, the daughter of a provincial mayor who is picking up parcels of land as fast as Don Fabrizio drops them. The cold calculation and hot sensuality of their courtship, as it rages through...
Urbane, skeptical, ironic and wryly melancholy, Don Fabrizio is a major fictional character creation. Equally vivid are the evocation of the author's home soil and the wit with which Novelist Lampedusa can describe the single-minded gluttony of hungry rustics or the lethal chagrin of a jilted woman ("she wanted to kill as much as she wanted to die '"). But Lampedusa's subtlest effect is to write prose that seems to be aged in marble and encrusted with the patina of antiquity. Like a statue or a ruin, the book congeals a moment of time past...