The Leopard

Name: The Leopard
Author: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa · 1958

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 case against

on the style
“a dull plod through a conventional historical-realist fiction.”
a book blog
on the pacing
“I found the pacing very odd, not just because there’s little action.”
a book blog
on the women
“some reviewers have chided this novel for being sexist or misogynist”
five stars · a book blog
on Don Fabrizio
“I have rarely empathized less with any character I’ve ever met in fiction.”
a book blog