Docile in the Presence of The Leopard: A re-reading and appreciation

'You see; you, Bendicò, are a bit like them, like the stars; happily incomprehensible, incapable of producing anxiety.' He raised the dog's head, which was almost invisible in the darkness. 'And then with those eyes of yours at the same level as your nose, with your lack of chin, such a head can't possibly evoke malignant spectres in the sky.'

The more I scan the best seller lists and scan the pages of book sections in the New York Times or the Toronto Star, the less likely I feel compelled to read modern fiction. Non-fiction, more likely but only if it isn't about the Second World War or some facet of American culture like Joe Dimagio or one of the presidents. For me, I love any book with Europe as a backdrop and whether the story is true or not, I don't care, let me relive a 19th century or Fin-de-siecle scene, let me go back to a time when yes the world was less politically correct and the books belonged to a readership that cared about reading and the future of literature as if it was a perennial child worth protecting. 

One could say I am misguided or not mindlessly hip to the latest trends, that I'm not sensitive enough to the rise of minority authors whose voices are beginning to emerge. I won't apologize when I say I don't care about colonialism or Africa. It's not that I'm culturally challenged, it's that I'm not drawn to those stories. I wasn't repressed by a corrupt regime nor was my family enslaved and made to work for King Leopold. I feel compassion for this culture but I'm simply not interested.

Moreover, anything recommended to me by a bookstore CEO or a celebrity strikes me as a conflict of interest. 

It doesn't matter, really, what I think; I'm a small voice and prefer a dwindling, fading interest group. More and more are modern bookshelves being stocked with anything but White European Males. From what I've gathered, the majority of serious fiction is written by scholars and academics and everything else by people who probably watch more television and film that read (which would explain the plots of 90% of popular fiction). 

I am a cynic, an angered one at times but also a docile devotee of the classics and I continue to turn away from the latest literary aggrandizations, books approved by the so-called literary hierarchy, books written by writing students and graduates of MFA programs in favour of books approved by time. I shrug away these authors of the present, their hopeless and naked insistence on their own importance and significance and let the masters entertain and edify me.

And The Leopard is such a book wherein I don't feel like I'm reading but experiencing and entering a more enthralling and honest existence.

Whenever I long for something with a balanced tone of both beauty and melancholy, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's sullen masterpiece is what I think of. I compare his work to the best of Ivan Bunin and Joseph Roth; truly, all three men seemlessly capture the yearning for another era while depicting an opulence of sensations and moods in their literarly worlds. For Bunin, that wistful, pastoral era before the Russian Revolution equipped him with his most sensual of memories. He is the young man in most of his pastoral and erotic stories, hounded by the stirrings of the flesh and ultimately aware of the near-defunct caste system that existed in Tzarist Russian. Roth, an outsider, too managed to cast a shining, late evening, golden shower of light onto his stage where his tragic characters mingle and fall. For most of Roth's figures are men broken because their Empire is buried and gone. They are survivors of wars but unable to co-exist with the emerging values and changes that are more like cancers than cures. 

Though while Bunin and Roth would lead more literary lives, publishing their works throughout the years, Lampedusa wouldn't even live to see his manuscript in a book form. Born in 1896 he only began his masterpiece in 1955. The first complete draft was rejected and he turned to story writing. In 1957 he finished a second draft, the present work but it too was unworthy of the presses. He died of lung cancer in July of the same year. Finally, Lampedusa's wife, through the help of the young Ferrarese writer, Georgio Bassani (author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - 1962) landed a publisher in 1958 and overnight, it became an instant success.

The criticism first leveled at the book before publication is that it was too old-fashioned and unbalanced. In the world after Hiroshima, James Joyce, Frank Kafka, Auschwitz and the bikini, Lampedusa's sombre and pessimistic novel about a Prince (his own great-grandfather) and his family in the changing times of the Risorgimento (Italian Unification) seemed outdated and lacking in significance. Literary writers were supposed to be experimental and avante-garde and here comes this staid and stately perspective on Sicily and Sicilian culture in the 19th century. 

Many of these initial and subsequent critics, however, were unable to conceive of the book's greater, more timeless themes of aging, the challenge to tradition and the longing for the eternal as depicted in the Prince's love of the stars and mathematics. Even the Prince's dog, Bendicò is caught up in the realm of the prestige lifestyle and a quasi-victim in the end. 

The book, thankfully, remains an undisputed classic. It is read as a kind of social history, an essay on Sicily in the mid-1800s but also as a narrative, a tale about one man's way of life giving way to a newer, less-refined one. Though the Prince has male off-spring, he is more attached to his nephew, Tancredi, a soldier in Garibaldi's army. Though he is born aristocratic, the youth's stature is liberal and progressive and the Prince understands and admires, if not sadly, the boy's position. Perhaps he sees a bit of himself in the young man. 

Much of the novel takes place amongst the palaces of Don Fabrizio. In the first chapter we meet his wife and children, the daughters being represented by Concetta who secretly loves Tancredi and yet possesses her father's haughty attitude to the rustic and roughened. Though they are the elite of Sicily they mingle amongst their people  and during one dinner, the Mayor of Donnafugata, Don Calogero Sedarà, born of peasant stock is given the opportunity to present his daughter, Angelica who will charm and eventually marry Tancredi.

The book isn't so much plot-driven but what I would call mood-inspired (much like Bunin's stories). This isn't a page turner with mysteries teasing the reader following the close of each unresolved chapter. Instead, there are scenes and from these moments, the characters reveal themselves and the narrator, Lampedusa reveals his philosophies. At one point, not long after the couple is affianced, the two lovers go wandering through the vast and labyrinth palace of Don Fabrizio's palace in Donnafugata. Though it is autumn, the season is eternal and more like a golden age in which the unaccompanied couple - for they were wise and quick to lose the clueless, French maid - sail through the palace "on a ship made of dark and sunny rooms, of apartments sumptuous or squalid, empty or crammed with remains of heterogeneous furniture". Though the narrator is omniscient, there are tones of the Prince and of Lampedusa. Don Fabrizio, we learn quickly in the first chapter isn't entirely faithful to his wife and though we know the wide-eyed couple is alone, they are depicted as foolish and naive by a prose reflecting the loss of innocence and impending disillusionment. Through these very embittered but tender, narratie eyes, from this opinion, we learn to regard the couple as children and the scenes summarized as such: "Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success; a preparation, however, in a way sufficient to itself, exquisite and brief; like those overtures which outlive the forgotten operas they belong to and hint in delicate veiled gaiety at tall the arias which later in the opera are to be developed undeftly, and fail."

There are other great and wondrous telling sentences (Tumeo, a friend of the Prince poetically says of Angelica: 'Her sheets must smell like paradise'). The entire book, if anything is filled with such lines that an intoxicated reader might pause on every page and underline yet another favourite passage or paragraph. It is less a book than a series of portraits and paintings, landscapes and sculptures, vignettes and tableaux. The focus, though, isn't entirely on the Prince. At one point we travel with the Jesuit, Father Pirrone to his hometown where he saves his niece from being disowned by her brother-n-law. In these moments, Lampedusa depicts the Sicilian peasantry as fixed on acquisition and pride. Though they are strangers to the upper echelons, the noble feasts and gatherings they share with their favoured contemporaries a nefarious penchant for possession. 

I suppose what I love best about the book is this ease, this sprezzatura, if you will in which Lampedusa has written his masterpiece. Sprezzatura is, naturally, of Italian origin and first coined by Baldassare Castligone in his Book of the Courtier (there is an excellent non-fiction book aptly entitled Sprezzatura written by Peter D'Epiro that describes 50 Italians and their genius - Lampedusa is 48 on the list) The definition of the word suggests a 'nonchalant' approach to one's own art, as if its creation came without effort. Lampedusa isn't so much an author but a kind of presence and his sentences and the pace of his book have a realism to them that is sensual and yet intellectual. Like Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary is something Lampedusa also had done; he has taken his snap shots and has painted this long ago era with a humanistic brush. He doesn't skimp on the uncomfortable truth, nor does he embody his characters with unnatural virtues. I love that he isn't kind but he isn't exactly critical for the sake of criticism. He knows the truth is shunned and opens the battered door, revealing what others would like to see draped in majesty and regal hues and instead shows the decay: the soldier's body in the garden with his intestines nakedly spilling out, the unshaven faces of the mayor and his awkward evening dress, and the stuffed body of the family dog soon to be thrown out with the trash. There are edges and they rightly remain revealed. 

Lampedusa refuses to make his book a happy one nor is it completely pessimistic. I would say it is neither joyful nor sad but a rightful, amenable approach to narrative and prose in that it avoids labels and exists for the sake of the life's curiosity and satisfaction. What one arrives at and what one takes from the book is wholly personal.

Maybe I revere this anti-establishment approach. The book is anything but trendy or approved by a six or seven-figure salaried personality. It is that rare beauty, the obstinate, anti-James Joyce novel, a book written not for art's sake but for the human sake, to remind the head-in-sand reader that all glitters doesn't remain gold nor was it always golden. It casts a pall, like a rain storm on a sunny, summery beach where one can find another beach reader with their chick lit - another trade paper back with a sparkly, cartoon cover or one showing photo-shopped tanned legs and a paper shopping bag. This wasn't a book written with movie rights in mind (though there is an excellent film directed by Visconti). No, it is a challenging read because it doesn't so much invite the reader - no, The Leopard, despite the elegant prose seems to tolerate the intruder moving slowly through the pages (it is always funny to think that the anti-hero you are reading about wouldn't even welcome you into his own home, let alone deign to shake your hand; I imagine Don Fabrizio more or less welcoming anyone with a rifle as if they were a pheasant). Lampedusa's tome reminds me of the Spinoza line: All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. Such a statement, one would think, exists solely for books like this.

I am a bit of a book snob. Guilty. Yet only because so few people care about literature. Lampedusa is the genius of the past century and I would take a chapter in his book over twenty bestseller lists approved by Twitterized critics. His writing humbles me and that is the true mission of great literature.