Choices - Fiction
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, an astronomer and a Sicilian prince, was 58 when he started to write The Leopard, though he had had it in his mind for 25 years. E. M. Forster called his work "one of the great lonely books." What renders it so beautiful and so discomfiting is its creator's grasp of human frailty and, equally, of Sicily's arid terrain. The author died at the age of 60, soon after finishing The Leopard, though he did live long enough to see it rejected as unpublishable.
It is now regarded as a classic of modern fiction. Set in the 1860s, it is the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution.
One of the highlights of the writer's style is the description. From the beginning the narrative is filled with beautiful descriptions of places, people and food, but these never distract from the narrative.
10 copies
