The Leopard — Rota Fortunae, interior view
Somewhat overshadowed by its (excellent) filmic adaptation, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 20th-century classic is a probing examination of class politics and the interminable dance of history. The only novel from the last Prince of Lampedusa, every page of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is steeped in the slow downfall of a dying aristocracy told from within. The book surpasses many a more famous work in its delicacy and artfulness, a work both timely and timeless and a piercing meditation on change, power and mortality.
Focusing on Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, his family, and their entourage, The Leopard is a story of epic proportions spanning fifty years told through eight vignettes of their aristocratic life. Beginning during 1860 in the middle of the Risorgimento (the unification of Italy spanning 1848–71), the societal turbulence engulfing Sicily is revealed piecemeal in the shifting conversations that span the book.
Unignorably political, the story is one of the differing approaches of the aristocracy to their changing place in society and the ultimate futility of resistance to the tide of history. And as the book progresses, the Corbera family is faced with their decline as aristocrats as well as the emergence of the bourgeoisie and how to treat their eventual usurpers. It is a world described richly by di Lampedusa, a world he evidently knew well not only in its physical minutiae and social customs but also the underlying feeling of decay that accompanies them; his palace having been destroyed in1943 during the Allied invasion of Sicily, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was the last to use the princely title. Throughout the novel’s balls, dinners and hunting parties permeates a sense of their imminent end, a sense perfectly realised by a master prosist.
Not as immediately obvious but by no means less significant is the book’s parallel discussion of death. Mirroring the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy is the decline of the titular prince himself, a decline which catalyses an introspective reflection on his own morality and on the inevitability of his own mortality. Revealed in the novel’s quieter moments and in the quiet pauses of its great events, Don Fabrizio Corbera and his meditations are a masterfully executed example of a slow awakening and a challenge to the reader to (re-)consider their own lives and actions.
As already mentioned, The Leopard is a slow waltz of a novel, spanning decades and generations. Part of di Lampedusa’s genius is his dividing of the novel into eight chapters all recounting short periods of time, at most a day, in the life of the Corbera family; by doing so, he gives a sense of epic scope in the span of around 300 pages. The book deftly reveals its development through the changing of attitudes and actions over a lifetime, eschewing forced melodrama for gradual metamorphosis and ellipsis. By doing so, the work becomes one of the great novels about history that, more than simply recounting a significant event or evoking a singular time period, measures the very heartbeat of history, cyclical and interminable; the only other works that compare to it in this regard are Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.
The Leopard is a book ponderous and majestic, but also of a lightness which marks it as a work of immense skill. Di Lampedusa, a true yet self-aware aristocrat, infuses his writing and his protagonist with a sense of cynical humour which derides the vain excesses of its characters and their apparent blindness to their own demise. Unavoidably linked to the aristocracy’s decline, the sardonic insights peppered throughout the novel prevent it from veering into self-indulgent melodrama, a sure trap for many a lesser writer. But the humour is also appropriately sparse, allowing for the perceived nobility of the nobility to manifest and preventing an unwelcome anachronistic ridicule from dominating the novel. Perfectly balanced, di Lampedusa allows the novel’s true tragedy to shine through while neither trivialising nor overdramatising it.
Martin Scorsese said of the book’s filmic adaptation “Time itself is the protagonist of The Leopard: the cosmic scale of time, of centuries and epochs, on which the prince muses; Sicilian time, in which days and nights stretch to infinity; and aristocratic time, in which nothing is ever rushed and everything happens just as it should happen, as it has always happened.” He is right; the story of The Leopard is that of history, its cycle of triumphs and defeats, and the eventual passing of all earthly powers. But it is also a highly personal story of a man confronting the end of his own existence, a reckoning with all he has done with the knowledge that soon he will be unable to repair any of it, a surrendering to time’s forces which unites the two thematic threads of the work — a true masterpiece.
P.S. Visconti’s film is a faithful and worthy adaptation of the book, one fully worth investigating. Its 70mm images are sumptuously frame-worthy (recalling Bondarchuk’s great War and Peace), and the story’s characters well-realised. The only aspect of the book that is lost in translation is the humour, which resided mostly in the prince’s internal monologue and thus found little room in the film. But that is a minor complaint; both versions are well worth one’s time.
