The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958

 In the middle of 2022, I was listening to Douglas Murray on Lex Fridman podcast when I heard something that was astonishing - Murray quoted an unnamed “Persian friend” who proclaimed that there were only two truly great novels of the 20th century - Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (link). This was humbling. I thought I knew something about literature, had read or was familiar with the great works and writers. I had of course closely read Vasily Grossman and wrote about it. But here was a work and a writer, ostensibly “obviously” among the greatest of the last hundred years, which I had not heard anything about? I was floored; I paused the video and researched. This was a sobering reminder to not be too high in one’s own self-estimation, and also a surprising joy. Putting aside any evaluation of Murray’s politics and ideology (which would be a long essay), he’s clearly respectable for his literary experience and perspective, and he had apparently introduced me to something new.

I sought out the Leopard for several months at multiple bookstores in the DC area, resisting the urge to order it on Amazon. It was nowhere to be found, so eventually I caved. Incidentally, a little while later I found the book at a small but impressive bookstore in Chelsea Market in Manhattan during a weekend trip. Meanwhile, I brought The Leopard with me to Tulum and began to read a few sections of it there - there was an amusing and happy coincidence that my friend Leander had just visited Naples a week beforehand. After I returned from Mexico on my birthday, I was given a Kindle by my girlfriend, which prompted me to borrow an ebook version of The Leopard from the DC Library on Libby, thus enabling me to return my Amazon copy. Finally, my little sidestory adventure, months long, of getting this highly praised yet hardly known book was over, and my reading could begin. 

The Leopard was written by the last in the line of the Princes of Lampedusa, a minor Sicilian noble family. The Lampedusa family’s house was largely destroyed in the Allied invasion of Sicily in the Second World War, presenting Giuseppe, Prince of Lampedusa at that time, with an all too obvious representation of the decline and disappearance of his own family and his class. In response to the resulting depression, many years later he wrote an “autobiographical” historical novel about his great grandfather Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa during the Risorgimento, or Italian Unification. 

Giuseppe had difficulty publishing the book and died before realizing his goal. A legend has grown about his tragically unrecognized genius which only increases the romantic allure of the The Leopard, but according to the introductory comments included in the book by the author’s relative, this is highly exaggerated - the manuscript was not so sharply criticized, not so roundly rejected as the legend would have us believe, and the manuscript was above all a victim of the slow bureaucratic publishing industry. It had been simply rerouted to another publisher on the recommendation of the first, and if Giuseppe had lived a year longer, he would’ve seen his published novel in print. But why dispel the convenient legend now?

The primary character is one Prince Fabrizio Salina, inspired by Tomasi’s ancestor mentioned above. Fabrizio is described as a very large and physically powerful man with an air of authority befitting his nobility. In his physical description and in his moment-to-moment self confidence in navigating the world, he is a kind of stereotype of a noble lord patriarch. The family symbol is the eponymous leopard, and the prince is often likened to one. His passing angers at dinners (due to little breaches of etiquette at the table) provokes him to mindlessly mangle his silverware with his bare hands (or paws), doing so often enough for there to be constant comings and goings to the repair service. Fabrizio’s wife is described as very small next to her husband, something she quite enjoys about him. He fundamentally maintains the feudal mentality, that of a noble patron looking down from a seat of power on his dependents and tenants across his estates. He is even described as quite intelligent and insightful, spending his time engaged in amateur astronomy, performing difficult mathematical calculations predicting the paths of comets in the night sky with sufficient skill to be awarded for it at the Sorbonne.

But while the impressive structure of the quintessential noble lord is there in Fabrizio, it is falling apart. He can’t be bothered to apply his intellect to the running of his estates or to maintaining, let alone growing, the Salina fortune - the estates are slowly sold off to fund the holes in the princely budget, although the Salinas have held on better than many other noble families. Certain peasant families, including the Sedaras of the Salinas’ Donnafugata village, have become wealthier than the nobility due to their personal cleverness and sense for opportunity. The Risorgimento was a revolutionary period, one where the institutions and society were thrown into uncertainty, and the nobility was forced to act to maintain its place. 

Prince Fabrizio is aware of the task of his time confronting him, and he muses several times about the need to act. He follows the activities of Garibaldi, of the Piedmontese, and he schemes on behalf of his nephew, Tancredi, Fabrizio’s adoptive ward. Tancredi is a noble whose fortune had already been destroyed by his idiot father, Fabrizio’s brother-in-law. He represents a forward step in the evolution of the Sicilian noble - no more economically productive, just as foolishly adventurous, but more ambitious in the modern sense, willing to breach the social class dividers in pursuit of renewed fortune and a political career. It is through Tancredi’s ambition that Fabrizio becomes convinced that the nobility may survive. Tancredi, who joins the Garibaldini, directly states to his uncle, “If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change.” Unfortunately, it becomes clear later on that the author, the descendent of these men, finds that this is a poisonous bargain that hollows out the family, destroying it. 

The plot revolves around the marriage of Tancredi to Angelica Sedara, beautiful daughter to a self-made businessman mentioned above, with the significant events of the Risorgimento happening in the background during 1860-1862. As is the case for many high, literary works, The Leopard is light on plot. Its value comes in its philosophical observations, its prose, symbolism, the historical verisimilitude, etc. One nice example is Bendico, the loyal and noble dog, as a symbol specifically called out by the author to the publishers - “The dog Bendico is a vitally important character and practically the key to the novel.” In the final moments of the book, many years after the main thrust of the story, Bendico’s preserved remains are thrown by the elderly Concetta out of the husk of the Salina house, really marking the final demise and change, both for good and bad.

I greatly enjoyed Tomasi’s philosophical description of the nature of Sicily (told through Fabrizio’s private musings), something about which I hadn’t read any discussions before. Indeed, the history of Sicily is just about as ancient as that of any region in the Mediterranean. Its story is one of constant and repeated invasions by a litany of famous and powerful polities. Sicily experienced colonization or conquest by the ancient Greeks, the ancient Carthaginians, the Romans, the Islamic Caliphate, the Spanish, and so on. The Unification could easily be seen as simply yet another foreign invasion by the Piedmontese. Fabrizio mused aloud to a Piedmontese representative about how these rulers had come and gone for 2,500 years or more and yet the nature of the land and its people had remained the same - and that nature is hardly a glowingly positive one, although likely the stuff of stereotype. The people are violent, slothful, inertial, and yet widely clever to the point of cynical, experts on the dolce vita, and everlasting in the face of everything. The summer sun is a curse, the rainy season a blessing - constant companions to the Sicilians since time immemorial. Salina doubts whether the Italians will succeed in changing Sicily anymore than did the ancients.

There were two scenes which stood out - that of the ball and the death of the prince. In the first scene, the Salinas hijacked a friend’s ball to introduce Angelica and her father to “society” - the author presents a charming and entertaining portrayal of noble leisure and culture at its most lovable and quintessential, and it’s a useful historical artifact for its capturing of the class in its time and place. And yet, in the midst of the frivolity, Fabrizio enters a serious reflection about the nature of human lifespan, about the cycle of vitality and decline. He confronts the idea of his own death and that of his generation, graying and getting old, at the same time as he appreciates the energy and naive love of the younger generation. He sees these as highly connected but at an unspannable distance. This is not just the nature of a single human life, but symbolizes that of history, of classes and periods and nations.

Soon thereafter, the author launches into the death scene for the Prince, from his own, first-person perspective, no less. The common advice in writing is to write what you know so that it is believable, and somehow Giuseppe Tomasi achieves this on a subject that no one can experience and then write about afterwards. Something Murray mentioned about reading after writing is that there are two kinds of pleasures - that when one recognizes how the author “did that,” and that when one has no idea how the author “did that.” I felt that this was the latter. Fabrizio approaches the end of life with grace, observing his life force leaving him like the sands leaving an hourglass. He engages in an accounting of his life, continuing his reflection from the ball. He identifies the scarce “flecks of gold” of really good times in his life. There were about 2-3 years worth of gold next to 70 or more of common stuff in his life. He is accompanied to his demise by his family, particularly his son and adopted son, Tancredi, and we are drawn to consider the paradox of continuity (in the form of inheritance by the next generation, personally and socially) and change (the differences between people, even in a family, across generations; social change, progress of history).

I'm not familiar with the pertinent modern history of Italy or of its unification - I have more familiarity with the Italy of the ancient world, of Rome and Greece, and then that of the 20th century, of Mussolini. There were many little surprising comments from a modern-day perspective by the author drawing comparisons to modern day Italian observations, presumably for the benefit of the Italian reader. Encountering these for the first few times drew me out of my suspension of disbelief - this is after all a historical novel. But on top of that, the cultural context wasn’t there for me. 

I read The Leopard in English, not Italian. The translation was noteworthy for its vocabulary - chock full of “SAT words” to the point of being distracting. I have no idea whether the original prose has that quality, and I suspect that English has the opportunity more than some other languages due to its many linguistic ancestors, but I found  myself using the Kindle’s dictionary function fairly often. There were times when the pinpoint accuracy of the word choice illuminated the meaning and the experience, and others when it obfuscated things. 

Also important to note was the very limited nature of the women characters of the story. This matches the typical literary styles of the 1800s, but this was written in the 1950s (albeit as a historical novel). Women are hardly in speaking roles and are there to be married, that’s about it.

On the subject of Murray’s remark about the book, I later found this blogpost from Murray (which I admittedly haven’t read in full) that includes the name of the friend mentioned in the podcast - Shusha Guppy. I engaged in a cursory read of her Wikipedia article, but I don’t yet have an adequate impression of her. But the instigating claim is patently absurd on its face. I won’t even touch the more general issue of ranking and ordering “greatness” of art or of establishing a canon. However, the quote was valuable to me for drawing attention to this work as a potential masterpiece. My initial approach to The Leopard was one of measured skepticism due to the exaggerated claim and my first evaluations during reading somewhat confirmed this. But as I thought more about the book while writing this review and reflection, my appreciation for the symbolism and moral message increased - The Leopard is accessing powerful issues of the march of time in humanity, at the levels of the human and of society and it does so symbolically and not so punishingly explicitly as to be too preachy. 

I’m not surprised that someone like Murray would hold The Leopard in high esteem. It indulges the conservative veneration of tradition, particularly the narrative of the lost golden age in the face of contemporary declines. Murray venerates Western tradition in particular, writing books lamenting the attacks on the West by Islam, Marxism, and other ideologies, which therefore means he must support (or at least have a soft spot for) the traditional European aristocracy, exactly what is depicted in The Leopard. Fabrizio also presents a strong symbol of traditional masculinity, not just for his physical strength and authoritativeness, but his nurturing actions towards those under his responsibility. 

After discussing the book itself, let me offer a few words about my first experience reading an ebook on a Kindle. There’s a significant benefit to the avoidance of dealing with the storage of an overly large collection of physical books and to the customizability of the text size, font, backlighting, and other aspects of the reading experience. I certainly would not consider reading a full length novel on a conventional computer or tablet screen, but the e-ink works well, even with backlighting. On the flip side, not being able to enjoy the view of my books displayed on the wall is quite sad, and I am loath to spend much money on Kindle ebooks, to simultaneously feed the Amazon beast and starve the independent bookstores like Politics and Prose, and others. I have several books on my bookshelf now in my backlog, but at some point I will face a difficult choice of how to purchase books going forward.