The Leopard
A Sicilian prince watches his world end. Don Fabrizio, aging head of the Salina family, sees Garibaldi's redshirts and the rising middle class dissolve the aristocracy he was born into, and meets it with irony rather than resistance. Lampedusa, himself the last prince of a fading Sicilian line, wrote his only novel at the end of his life; the publishers he sent it to turned it down, and it appeared in 1958, the year after he died, then became the best-selling Italian novel of the century.
The novel’s women are “hysterical and empty headed poufs” in its own phrasing, and readers who flag the line point to a priest’s private contempt for his niece as the pattern rather than the exception, a “sickening lack of empathy” running under the elegance. The book is also “not a plot driven book” by common agreement, “just a tad too static” for readers who wanted Sicily’s unification dramatized instead of arriving as household gossip. Its characters carry the author’s pessimism rather than opinions of their own, which is why one critic files the whole thing as a “dull plod through conventional historical-realist fiction” and its mood as “fashionable, elitist pessimism.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
