Lampedusa

July 15, 2019
A historical novel based on the life of a revered Italian writer. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa only ever wrote one novel. The Leopard was based on the life of his great-grandfather and set during the Risorgimento, or the unification of Italy. The novel became a classic in Italy, but Tomasi didn't live to see its success: He died of emphysema before the book was published. Price's (By Gaslight, 2016, etc.) novel is based on Tomasi's life at the time he was writing The Leopard. He was 60 years old, the last member of an aristocratic Sicilian family, and he was growing more and more ill. In Price's telling, Tomasi is a sweet, shy, soft-spoken man. He spends his days at bookstores and cafes, reading voraciously. In the evenings, Tomasi gives informal lectures on English literature to a couple of students while his wife, a psychoanalyst (unusual for the time--it's 1955), sees patients. The novel traces his writing of The Leopard as well as his memories of his childhood and adolescence. Price's writing is lyrical, though he slips sometimes into a certain preciousness; some passages are overwritten, even overwrought. Other than that, this is a quiet novel without a blaring plot. Tomasi writes, thinks, and remembers and struggles to tell his wife the truth about his illness. His "student friends"--Giò; his fiancee, Mirella; and Orlando--are almost like children to him. They're also a kind of advance guard of a new, modern age, which Tomasi recognizes his alienation from. History, he knows, is passing him by, and Price shows how Tomasi works that understanding into his own novel. A lyrical and sensitive portrait of a man nearing the end of his life.

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July 29, 2019
Price (By Gaslight) illuminates in fine fictionalized fashion the last years of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa as he struggles to write one of the glories of Italian literature, his only novel, The Leopard. In January 1955, Lampedusa is diagnosed with advanced emphysema. His marriage childless, Lampedusa wants to leave something behind after his death and comes up with the idea of a novel that takes place during Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in 1860. The result is The Leopard, an intimate epic of the dying social order in 19th-century Sicily, mirrored by Lampedusa’s observations about his own dying social order in the 20th. While writing, Lampedusa visits the remains of the family estate in Palma, considers adopting a young friend in order to pass on his title of duke, and reminisces about fighting on the Italian Front during WWI and meeting his wife, Alessandra, in London in 1925. Though light on plot, Price vividly recreates an Italy transitioning from postwar austerity to the beginnings of La Dolce Vita, juxtaposing crumbling palazzos with sleek, supercharged sports cars. Price makes Lampedusa as compelling a figure as Lampedusa’s hero, Prince Don Fabrizio Salina. Readers will savor this rich look at Italian history.