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; every publisher 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 famous paradox — change everything so that nothing changes — arrives on page one, and the Prince has resolved to do nothing before the book even opens, so his fatalism is the plot rather than something the plot puts to the test. The grandeur can read as a nobleman mourning his own caste at length, and the closing chapters jump years ahead to deathbeds and a dusty house, leaving the revolution itself mostly offstage. An elegy for the aristocracy written by an aristocrat: gorgeous, and a little in love with its own twilight.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.