186
pages, The Folio Society
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa (and,
in a fashion, by the English translator of this edition, Archibald Colquhoun) is
situated during the time of the Italian re-unification, the rise of Garibaldi
and his Red Shirt movement and the decline and subsequent transformation of the
feudal nobility in the late 19th Century. Di Lampedusa was himself a
descendent of one the noble families, and the story that he narrates is ostensibly
that of his grandfather. The Leopard
is the symbol of the family of which Prince Fabrizio, the principal character
in the novel, is the head. The novel reminded me of a couple of other such works,
one of which is surely Century in Scarlet
by the Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy. Both deal with more or less the same
theme, though from somewhat different sides: namely, the coming into being of
modern nation states in the 19th & 20th Centuries, and
the identities of two nations that were probably at the far end of the nation
forming processes that were set into motion a century or more earlier in some
of the other European states. I am not sure how comprehensive the novels are
from a sociological or political point of view, but both do provide the nearest
equivalent in a literary form.
Both
the novels are very straightforward in nature and though written in the 20th
Century, they are in the nature of the 19th Century novel, with a
linear narrative structure and few complexities in terms of the underlying
ideas they seek to communicate. The style is closest to Balzac’s, more in case
of The Leopard than perhaps Century in Scarlet, and is the story of
Prince Fabrizio who is forced to relinquish the control of his estates in the
light of the advance of Garibaldi’s republican forces. His ambitious nephew
Tancredi moves over to the new forces, calculatedly marrying the daughter of a
rising rich, though uncouth merchant Don Calogero who is eager to establish a
lineage for himself by marrying into the family of a noble, in the process
spurning Fabrizio's own daughter's hand. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now,
they'll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things
will have to change”, he informs his uncle, even as he looks at his uncle with
the “affectionate irony that youth accords to age”. That Prince Fabrizio aids
and abets his nephew in his cunning endeavors speaks much of the Prince's own
instinct for survival: “The bourgeois revolution climbing his stairs in Don
Calogero's tail coat”, as the Prince thinks while observing Don Calogero in his
house.
And
historically speaking he is right: the decline of the nobility is complete and
the power has shifted decisively in favor of the commercial bourgeoisie, with
the corresponding shift from the monarchy to a republic and the ideological
shift from the church – when the nobility's land is ostensibly “the patrimony
of the poor” – to the republican ideals. With the story being as simple as that
what holds the reader is the author’s effusive description of some of the
lesser known areas of Europe, Sicily, in this case. Added to that is the author’s
deep insight into human nature, which renders the novel a universal appeal and
finally his smooth, delectable, almost tropical prose. His metaphors are
particularly imaginative and I suppose that probably owes something to the
richness of the original language itself.
There
are a number of insightful sentences that are a delight for a reader. Though
the novel may beg comparison with, say, a 'War and Peace', to say nothing of a
novel like Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War
of the End of the World which is far more complex in the treatment of a
similar theme. Nevertheless, The Leopard
establishes itself as a minor classic of the 20th Century and hence
an important novel to those trying to understand the evolution of nations in an
era that seems to be dissolving a number of attributes of what have been associated
with the nation and national identities.
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