Word: lampedusa
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...Leopard has sired a cub. Giuseppe di Lampedusa's posthumous novel described the life of a decaying aristocratic family during a period of social crisis in Sicily; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis describes the life of a decaying upper-class family during a period of social crisis in Ferrara. What's more, Novelist Bassani, an established poet, critic and editor who was responsible for the publication of The Leopard, has obviously learned from the master: his style is as rich and iridescent as Lampedusa's, and the substance of his novel is similarly sturdy stuff...
...prince, finds the corpse of a royalist soldier. It is 1860, Garibaldi and his redshirts have landed in Sicily on their way to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy in Naples, and the dead sharpshooter signals the death of a way of life. In his elegiac novel, The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa chronicles this transformation. But The Leopard is more than a retelling of aristocratic decline. It is also a voyage through the consciousness of Don Fabrizio, who struggles to make sense of the paradox presented to him by his revolutionary nephew, Tancredi: "If we want things to stay as they...
Despite its sumptuous sets, the scene falls flat because it is peopled with characatures. The giggling girls, the pompous general, and the swooning old ladies could be taken from any number of films. And Visconti does not merely present them; he dwells on them. Moreover, he takes two of Lampedusa's most vivid characters and drams them of life. Don Calegro, the uneducated but shrewd mayor, becomes a drunken buffoon. Tancredi, the Prince's favorite, undergoes a rather obvious transition from youthful revolutionary to foppish conservative as the middle class reaction to change sets...
...posthumous masterpiece, which is arguably the finest Italian novel of the century, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, treats of these matters with an irony that seems half wisdom and half love, and in a style as rich and dark and subtle as old Marsala. In this film, Director Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers) preserves the author's tone as well as his tale, and in the course of three occasionally tedious hours develops a composite portrait of a time, a place and a man that finally emerges as a splendid set piece of cinema...
...Stories and a Memory, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Excellent minor pieces by the Sicilian prince whose elegiac novel of nobility's erosion, The Leopard, was a bestseller two years ago. The author's memoir of the great houses he lived in as a child is particularly good...