Word: sicilianism
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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...
...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...
Pagan Frieze. It is the story of Lampe-dusa's own great-grandfather, Giulio, set at the time of Garibaldi's landing in Sicily (1860), and the plot of The Leopard is as bare as a sun-seared Sicilian hillside. The hero-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...
...Sicilian Snopes. Like an embalmed pharaoh, Don Fabrizio is surrounded by his possessions, from powdered footmen to Murano chandeliers, from silver soup tureens to gold-flecked frescoes. When a soldier of the risorgimento turns up in Don Fabrizio's garden to remind him of the passions of the dispossessed, the prince gives his pet great Dane some conservative advice ("One never achieves anything by going bang! bang!'') and retreats to his telescope to contemplate the snobbish quietude of the stars...
...Sydney or Melbourne, a man who doesn't feel like Australia's traditional diet-steak and eggs, with tomato sauce poured over it-can dine on sukiyaki, entrecote a la bordelaise, or Koenigs-berger Klops. And at his new $500,000 pasta factory in Brisbane, Sicilian-born Frank de Pasquale complacently estimates that where only 5% of Australians ate spaghetti ten years ago, some 65% do now. There are other signs that "culture." though a suspect word, is a spreading fact. Since 1939, the number of college students has risen from 14,000 to 47,000, the number...