Word: lampedusa
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...Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. The first and only novel by a Sicilian prince who died in 1957, this is a wry, moving, melancholy elegy to the last century's aristocratic life, and its hero is a major fictional creation...
...LEOPARD (319 pp.)-Giuseppe di Lampedusa-Pantheon...
...spring of 1956, Sicilian Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa diffidently handed an unsigned manuscript copy of The Leopard to a friend, who put it away in a desk drawer and forgot it. Lampedusa later dispatched another copy of the story -which he had contemplated writing for a quarter-century-to a publisher's reader, who pronounced it unpublishable. Five days after this news, in July 1957, the cancer-ridden, 61-year-old prince died. Months later, the manuscript in the desk drawer was unearthed and sent to Gian Giacomo Feltrinelli, Doctor Zhivago's original publisher, who recognized its power...
...known in the novel as Don Fabrizio, prince of the House of Salina-simply lives out the death of his class, the feudal landed gentry. The only action is inaction. But to mistake the story for the subject is to assume that a pearl is about grit. Amateur Novelist Lampedusa's real interest and achievement is to fashion an elegy for a predemocratic way of life, to evoke the melodramatic landscape of Sicily and fix its people against the backdrop of Italy's struggle for unification, like figures on a frieze...
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...