A few weeks ago, I traveled to Italy. I hope to post about this experience later, but first I want to talk about part of my preparation for the trip. Before I take a major trip like this one, I often research the place I am going, and this includes reading about the history and culture of the place I will be visiting.
I came across the book The Leopard by accident. In the months before the Italian trip, anything in the papers, news, or magazines that had anything to do with Italy attracted my attention. A few months ago the New York Times published an essay about literature in Italy, an article I can't locate at present, in which the author lamented that the country of "Dante and DiLampedusa" doesn't read novels.
DiLampedusa? Never heard of him. (Her?) A quick Google netted me the name Guiseppe di Lampedusa, a native of southern Italy and descendant of Sicilian nobility, a man who wrote a single book in his lifetime entitled The Leopard, judged unpublishable in his lifetime, but published shortly after his death, in 1958, to world acclaim.
I found it on the shelf in Lemuria Bookstore here in Jackson, and bought it. (Lemuria always seems to stock books that matter.) The Leopard, in Italian Il Gattopardo, is truly one of the best books I have ever read, a sheer joy, easy to read, a pleasure to absorb, and the kind of book one takes a lifetime to process. I am surprised, good as it is, that I had never heard of it before.
The book is about Prince Fabrizio Corbera of Salina, of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, and takes place during the Risorigimento, a period in Italian history from 1815 to 1871 when the many Italian states that occupied the Italian peninsula unified into a single modern nation. To understand the story it helps to know a little of the historical background: In the 1860s, Victor Emmanuel II, King of Milan, is in the process of conquering Italy, and his general, Guiseppe Garibaldi, is leading the charge. As the novel opens, Garabaldi prepares to land in Sicily and take the island for Emmanuel and his Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. During the course of the novel, Sicily and southern Italy are conquered by Garibaldi and incorporated into the Milanese empire.
Like most Americans, I have no sense of the social changes that swept through Sicily during the Risorgimento. I don't know what Sicily was like before the change, or what it was like after. Di Lampedusa only alludes to the changes, never giving specifics. But he doesn't need to. Somehow anyone who has ever witnessed social change (and we all have) can appreciate the apprehension and sadness of a world passing away. To read The Leopard with the necessary empathy, knowing this is more than enough.
Though the book takes place during and after a war, it is not mainly about war, no more than and probably much less than Gone With the Wind is about war. Like GWTW, The Leopard is more about a way of life passing away during and after war than about actual defeat in battle, but unlike the American novel, it is not burdened by the difficult issue of slavery (which in GWTW Margaret Mitchell is never really able to completely contend with). But unlike the typical this-time-is-passing-away novels, The Leopard broadens this theme beyond Italy to all human experience, to life and death itself.
For instance, the following passage, one of the funniest and yet saddest in all of The Leopard, reminds us that not only Sicilian nobility culture, but all things, must pass away, sometimes in the most unromantic fashion. In it Prince Salina observes a ball, and the paintings on the ceiling of the ballroom above it.
The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943. (p.258)
Di Lampedusa could write with almost unbearable beauty, and one of the sorrows I took from this book is that The Leopard is virtually all we have from him. In a later passage, also at the same ball, the Prince makes a lengthier observation about the attendants at the party, an observation that has all of the glitter of high romanticism and much of the earthiness of modernism.
What I love most about this passage is its humanity, its compassion. I may be in the minority here, but I think nothing makes art greater than when it shows compassion.
The two young people moved away, other couples passed, less handsome, just as moving, each submerged in their transitory blindness. Don Fabrizo [Prince Salina] felt his heart thaw; his disgust gave way to compassion for all these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms. How could one inveigh against those sure to die?...Nothing could be decently hated except eternity....
And these people filling the rooms, all these faded women, all these stupid men, these two vainglorious sexes were part of his blood, part of himself..."I may be more intelligent, I'm certainly more cultivated, but I come from the same stock as they, with them I must make common cause."
This passage came at a time in the novel when my sympathy for the Prince was flagging because of his privileged ways and attitudes. It was just the kind of humanity I needed to rekindle my interest in him, and DiLampedusa knew how to bring it in at exactly the right time.
A delightful book, and a short one. I recommend it to anyone and everyone.