Set in the Sicily of the 19th century, at the time of Garibaldi and the civil war, The Leopard tells the story of Prince Fabrizio Salina, who through the pages of the story, slowly declines from womaniser, sportsman and bastion of the aristocracy, towards gentil poverty, inconsequence and death. He lavishes his favour on his nephew Tancredi, rather than on his own children, even promoting the marrige of Tancredi to the beautiful Angelica, daughter of an upstart mayor, in preference to his own daughter. As the Leopard loses his lustre, and his palaces become dusty, threadbare and empty so the world in which he was pre-emminent passes away.
Though in translation the book is written in exquisite prose, full of irony and gentle wit. It is a commentary on custom and tradition, the exhuberance of youth, the regrets of age, and the slow inevitability of life seeping away grain by grain like sand through an hour glass.
This book deservedly finds it's place in lists of a 100 best novels. It's a classic to savour, to keep and read again.
Here's a little taste:
“...waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink, he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day's activities, he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realize that deep inside him they left a sediment of grief which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.”
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