I read this book for A Level Italian in 1968 and Sicily is one of my favourite places on earth. Noto and Ragusa are spectacular, also the Roman and Greek temples at Agrigent.
Richard Riheed
2 years ago
I read The Leopard for the first time a couple of years ago. It has stayed with me in a way very few books do. Thank you for this article.
Alka Hughes-Hallett
2 years ago
Such a sympathetically written article. Looking for introspection and searching for answers from within.
I loved “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Thank you.
Jim le Messurier
2 years ago
I read this book earlier this year, I’m happy to say. Mr. Clare gives The Leopard the eulogy it deserves. As a novel, it’s probably (or at least very nearly) in a class all of its own.
Last edited 2 years ago by Jim le Messurier
Stephen Rose
2 years ago
Lovely article, sensitively evoking one of my favourite novels, the film is great, exquisitely filmed. Burt Lancaster is brilliantly cast as the Leopard.
For all the Prince’s pragmatism and bending to realpolitik, nobody ends up powerful or happy. The unquestioning loyalty of his servants, prepared to support the old order, that he is abandoning to maintain privilege , is particularly relevant to our times.
I must have bought 4 copies of this book, because I have lent it out so many times and never got it back. I bought a first edition 40 years ago, which I still treasure.
Brian Pottinger
2 years ago
For me the most poignant and prescient quotation is by the Jesuit priest Father Pirrone to Don Pietrino about the resilience of the old elites: “It’s a class difficult to suppress because it is in continual renewal and because it can die well, that is it can throw out its seed at the moment of death. Look at France; they let themselves be massacred with elegance there and now they’re back as before. I say as before, because it is difference of attitude, not estates and feudal rights, which make a noble.”
Philip LeBoit
2 years ago
I read an English translation a few years ago, but your beautifully written and heartfelt piece has made me resolve to re-read it in Italian.
Alan Thorpe
2 years ago
To be read whilst drink a glass of Donna Fugata white wine.
Dapple Grey
2 years ago
‘Lampedusa refers to the catastrophe obliquely in the last line of the book: writing of his characters and their world he concludes: “Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.”’ It must have been a premonition as the earthquake happened in 1968 and The Leopard was published in 1958.
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
“the great quake of Covid-19, we in Britain and across the West might feel more Sicilian: less insulated than we were, as a people, from life’s final reality.”
Our dreary. self inflicted, social, economic, freedom crushing, pathological response to the virus was hardly the Great Earthquake or the Allied Bombing.
If covid-19 taught you of mortality I suspect you were a great innocent.
David McDowell
2 years ago
A wonderful book but Sicily is very overrated, Wales in a heatwave.
This is such a beautifully written review. It makes me want to read The Leopard, perhaps even one day to visit Sicily.
Do both, as soon as you can (and after reading it, watch the movie). You will find your life enhanced!
I read this book for A Level Italian in 1968 and Sicily is one of my favourite places on earth. Noto and Ragusa are spectacular, also the Roman and Greek temples at Agrigent.
I read The Leopard for the first time a couple of years ago. It has stayed with me in a way very few books do. Thank you for this article.
Such a sympathetically written article. Looking for introspection and searching for answers from within.
I loved “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Thank you.
I read this book earlier this year, I’m happy to say. Mr. Clare gives The Leopard the eulogy it deserves. As a novel, it’s probably (or at least very nearly) in a class all of its own.
Lovely article, sensitively evoking one of my favourite novels, the film is great, exquisitely filmed. Burt Lancaster is brilliantly cast as the Leopard.
For all the Prince’s pragmatism and bending to realpolitik, nobody ends up powerful or happy. The unquestioning loyalty of his servants, prepared to support the old order, that he is abandoning to maintain privilege , is particularly relevant to our times.
I must have bought 4 copies of this book, because I have lent it out so many times and never got it back. I bought a first edition 40 years ago, which I still treasure.
For me the most poignant and prescient quotation is by the Jesuit priest Father Pirrone to Don Pietrino about the resilience of the old elites: “It’s a class difficult to suppress because it is in continual renewal and because it can die well, that is it can throw out its seed at the moment of death. Look at France; they let themselves be massacred with elegance there and now they’re back as before. I say as before, because it is difference of attitude, not estates and feudal rights, which make a noble.”
I read an English translation a few years ago, but your beautifully written and heartfelt piece has made me resolve to re-read it in Italian.
To be read whilst drink a glass of Donna Fugata white wine.
‘Lampedusa refers to the catastrophe obliquely in the last line of the book: writing of his characters and their world he concludes: “Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.”’
It must have been a premonition as the earthquake happened in 1968 and The Leopard was published in 1958.
“the great quake of Covid-19, we in Britain and across the West might feel more Sicilian: less insulated than we were, as a people, from life’s final reality.”
Our dreary. self inflicted, social, economic, freedom crushing, pathological response to the virus was hardly the Great Earthquake or the Allied Bombing.
If covid-19 taught you of mortality I suspect you were a great innocent.
A wonderful book but Sicily is very overrated, Wales in a heatwave.