THE LEOPARD (Il Gattopardo) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 🇮🇹 BOOK REVIEW [CC] 

Il Gattopardo is one of my favorite novels, particularly for the quality of its dialogue and its deep meditation on history and change. One of my favorite dialogues is between the Prince of Salina and Chevalley di Monterzuolo, in which the prince is offered a position in the new government/order but politely declines the same. The next day, as the two walk together and witness the scenes of Sicily around them, both feel that the situation must change. Here the author does something very interesting, namely revealing that while the Piedmontese Chevalley feels that things will change, the Sicilian Salina feels that nothing will change at all. This is an amazing reflection on conditions of Italian history that persist to this very day in 2020, with an almost fundamental disconnect between the north and south of the country. Lampedusa manages to capture the drama of Sicilian history, which absorbs all new arrivals and invaders and keeps going on more or less as before. Tancredi and Calogero are standouts in that they manage to emerge from this paradigm, but the inertia of history is so great that Lampedusa knows that Sicily will take centuries to change - and there is no telling that it will be in a way that matches the rest of Italy. One of the tragic themes of Il Gattopardo is well-meaning individuals who interact with one another but ultimately fail to understand one another.

The Leopard is one of those books I've wanted to read for a while, though I didn't know much about its contents. As always, I'm grateful for your review; you provide context and capture an essence of a book in such a fashion that I want to read it immediately.

wonderful review of one of my favourite novels! your impression is really valuable, thank you so much.

Ohh yes, The Leopard is one of the books in my wishlist 😌🐆

Great review of one of my Top 10 books of all times - I also did a short video on this novel. You also mentioned the publishing history, which is really interesting. I never watched the movie ... I really should !

Excelente reseña 👍! Conocí el libro por la película dirigida por Luschino Visconti me encantó la interacción entre el personaje de Alain Delon y Burt Lancaster . Me imagino que esto se logra por lo que tú dices que la novela tiene magníficos dialogos .Hace algunos meses pude adquirir este libro y con lo que dices al respecto me dan muchas ganas de leerlo .

This book is fabulous! Loved it!

When you said, "...[The author] was the last prince of Lampedusa. [He] was a member of the Sicilian aristocracy writing about the Sicilian aristocracy...He knew what he was talking about", the following came to mind: - For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories, and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families. ("The Leopard")

Great video! The Leopard has been on my TBR for a couple of years now, ever since my ancient history professor read us passages from it on our excursion to Sicily. I was lucky to find a used copy in German translation in a charity shop 2 years ago, but still haven't got around to actually reading it. I've just bumped it further up on my priority list.

What a great review on this classic. I encountered it when readers in Spain were raving about it on Twitter. I asked my Italian friend about it and he said it was a political novel and that fizzled my interest a little bit. I would like to get to it since another italian friend is always complaining about how Sicilian Italian is not Italian. lol His nationalistic derision makes me curious. Thank you for this, put it back to my attention.

Entrando al portal de mi librería para ver si tienen El Gatopardo.

Is there much lost in translation to English, especially bearing in mind the wonderful dialogue that you mentioned?

i was just holding my old copy of this the other day and wondering if i would ever get round to reading it again - i really want to as i liked it a lot (and the film!) the first time, all that decadence and decay and hopeless pretence, but i was quite young and didn't engage with it politically, like i think i might now. i was thinking about it coz i've been watching the brit drama The Crown with my family and that show delves into similar territory when it comes to how an old elite/ruling class institution evolves to preserve its identity in a more egalitarian world where its influence and authority is increasingly diminished and domesticated ~

Could this also apply to the British monarchy?: - The wealth of many centuries had been transmitted into ornament, luxury, pleasure; no more; the abolition of feudal rights had swept away duties as well as privileges; wealth, like an old wine, had let the dregs of greed, even of care and prudence, fall to the bottom of the barrel, leaving only verve and color. ("THE LEOPARD")