Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

You say you want a revolution?

I am often drawn to a novel by the story behind the story: Proust writing night after night in a cork-lined room like a literary Dracula; Henry Roth chipping away at four decades of writer’s block to create the best book of the 1990s; Bolaño refusing hospitalization in hopes of finishing his masterpiece. I feel these acts of artistic heroism should not go unrewarded. Authors who dip their quill in a mixture of blood, sweat and tears deserve to be read.

And so it is with Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. According to literary legend, Lampedusa’s only novel germinated within him for a quarter century before being planted on paper (only to lie unpublished when its author suddenly died). Then, posthumously, the manuscript was printed and praised as one of the finest literary efforts of the 20th century.

The definitive, 50th-anniversary edition includes a new foreword by the author’s nephew, plus previously deleted material and an account of the work’s tortuous publishing history.

The Leopard is set in the early 1860s as Italian folk hero Garibaldi leads his ragged troops in revolt against the Bourbon Empire. We experience this historical moment through the Prince of Salina, modeled after Lampedusa’s own paternal great-grandfather. In fact, by basing the book’s major characters on his family history, Lampedusa knocks down the psychological barrier that makes many historical novels feel well researched but soulless.

Partaking—by turns—in the Prince’s amusement and then his mounting frustration with the revolution’s ripples, the protagonist faces the same thing our Western culture faces today. (The Leopard is a story of revolution, and revolution is always in the news.) The Prince maneuvers to protect his family’s fortunes by making social allowances, mimicing the maneuvering of today’s governments, which hope to thwart the social tides that might sweep them away.