The Leopard: Discover the breath-taking historical classic

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The Prince claims that Sicilian sensuality is a love affair with death; that a desire for the grave obsesses the island's culture and will seep out of Sicily to poison the new Italy. What we now have from Pantheon is a reissue of the Colquhoun text, framed by some very interesting new material. Containing, for the first time in any language, the full original text, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic tale lovingly memorialises the details of a vanishing world while retaining its melancholic and ironic sense of time passing and the frailty of human emotions. It was one of two that Lampedusa completed in the last few months of his life, and both of them got left out of the package that was mailed to, and finally accepted by, the editor Giorgio Bassani. To this end, two editions of the books are available—a Classic and an Ultimate—featu

The Leopard is a true novel: It has a fully formed central character, a narrative thrust that keeps you reading, even a historical grounding in the events surrounding Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily and the creation of modern Italy. The book foreshadows political life in the newly unified kingdom and economic transformations that paved the way for corruption and criminal organisations in post-1945 Italy. Mondadori rejected the novel in December 1956, although their rejection left open the possibility of considering a future version of the same work.A university professor despises a parish schoolmaster even if he doesn’t show it, and since you’re asleep I can tell you without reticence that we clergy consider ourselves superior to the laity, we Jesuits superior to the other clergy, just as you herbalists despise tooth-pullers who in their turn deride you. He is also the author of The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj and of several books on Spain and the Middle East.

As with the previous Harry Hole novels, The Leopard is translated from Norwegian into English by Don Bartlett. In its integrity he described the house as ‘a kind of eighteenth-century Pompeii, all miraculously preserved intact’; in its desolation it symbolises the death of the Sicily to which he had belonged.Lampedusa’s masterpiece, one of the finest works of twentieth century fiction, is set amongst an aristocratic family facing social and political changes in the wake of Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in 1860. The Book Review likened Lampedusa’s style to Flaubert’s and Stendhal’s, and praised his “happy merging of dry irony with subtle poetic feeling” and his depiction of the prince, torn “between lust and intelligence. On a trip to the Salina estate in the town of Donnafugata the Prince learns that the mayor, Don Calogero Sedara, has become wealthy through dodgy business transactions and political influence and that his wealth now rivals that of the Salinas. The lukewarm publisher felt that The Leopard was “very serious and honest” but also “rather old-fashioned” and “essayish. In the course of a recent journey through Sicily I visited each of the Cutò and Lampedusa houses in turn.

In his 1513 work, Il Principe (The Prince), Machiavelli created a monster that has haunted politics ever since. He was sitting on a bench, inertly watching the devastation wrought by Bendicò in the flower beds; every now and again the dog would turn innocent eyes toward him as if asking for praise at labor done: fourteen carnations broken off, half a hedge torn apart, an irrigation canal blocked. All these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind. More dismal still is the state of the Palazzo Cutò at Santa Margherita, most beautiful of all the palaces and inspiration for Donnafugata in The Leopard.It seems to me,” he says, “to offer a measure of interest because it evokes a Sicilian nobleman at a moment of crisis (not to be taken to mean simply that of 1860) . Hole and Solness, teaming up with Hole's former colleagues at Crime Squad, begin an undercover investigation into the case without the knowledge of Kripos.