Items related to The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Synopsis
In 1957, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, the last member of a great Sicilian family, died childless, impoverished and unknown, leaving behind him a recently completed manuscript of a novel. The following year that novel, The Leopard, was published to great acclaim and is now recognised as one of the finest works of twentieth-century fiction. For a quarter of a century Italian and foreign scholars were denied access to the reclusive writer's papers until, following a meeting with Lampedusa's adopted son, David Gilmour succeeded in gaining permission to work in the writer's last home in Sicily. There, and in the nearby ruin of the Palazzo Lampedusa, he found many letters, diaries, notebooks and photographs which had not seen the light of day since Lampedusa's death. In The Last Leopard, David Gilmour brings to life not only an enigmatic writer of genius, but the slow, careful distillation of an undoubted masterpiece.
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From Kirkus Reviews
The first official biography of Giuseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa and author of The Leopard, recounted by British journalist (and family friend) Gilmour with an elegance and precision worthy of his subject. When The Leopard was published in 1958 to great acclaim, Lampedusa was already one year dead and entirely unknown as a writer. Intensely shy and self-contained, he did not even begin writing until late in life and left the world no picture of himself save that contained in his portrait of Don Fabrizio, the doomed aristocrat of his novel, whose declining fortunes mirrored that of the Lampedusa family. The last scion of a long line of Sicilian nobility, Lampedusa grew up in a world that had little use--and no role--for him, and he found his only refuge from the tedium of daily life in literature: A voracious reader, he was capable of working his way through entire novels at a single sitting. Ill at ease among intellectuals, Lampedusa made little use of his literary interests until--well into middle age--he began to give informal lectures on English poetry and prose to a small circle of friends. Gradually he formed the notion of writing a novel that would ``preserve'' the nearly vanished world of Sicily's ancien r‚gime, much as the works of Dickens had captured 19th-century London. With marvelous insight and clarity (aided by an unimpeded access to Lampedusa's notes and papers), Gilmour traces the process by which the aging prince came to an understanding of his own history and managed to transform what he himself saw as ``a largely wasted life'' into one of the most controversial and admired novels of the century. A fascinating chronicle: Gilmour writes with the assurance of a seasoned scholar and the ease of a born storyteller. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Publishers Weekly
At age 47 Giuseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa (1896-1957), still slept in the bedrom where he had been born. The abnormally taciturn recluse, who mined the history of his Sicilian aristocratic family in its ruinous decline for his classic novel The Leopard , had a "vexatious, disappointing and often pathetic life." His arrogant, sharp-tongued father, fueled by a ridiculous sense of pride, spent much of his life quarreling with relatives over money. Lampedusa's domineering mother nearly wrecked her son's marriage to psychoanalyst Beatrice Mastrogiovanni, a largely epistolary relationship for years at a stretch. In this elegant, sprightly biography, Gilmour ( Lebanon: The Fractured Country ) draws an incisive portrait of a curious modernist outsider deeply skeptical of all human motives. Lampedusa's fictional counterpart, Don Fabrizio, The Leopard 's protagonist, likewise seems a contemporary figure swinging from hedonistic pursuits to the contemplation of eternity without a personal God. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherHarvill Press
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 1843430576
- ISBN 13 9781843430575
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages240
- Rating
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