The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa - Softcover

David Gilmour

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860462219 ISBN 13: 9781860462214

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 1997

Synopsis

BRAND NEW (NOT used) FIRST EDITION First Printing softcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; WE SHIP FAST. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201512394 This biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa is a fine book in its own right, but its greater merit is the way it illuminates both the novel and the movie that remain as the legacy of di Lampedusa's career. Aside, perhaps, for his friends and neighbors, we wouldn't remember him at all were it not as the author of "The Leopard," not published until after his death, but in time to emerge as perhaps the best-known Italian novel of the 20th Century. Most people, whether or not they have ever heard of the novel, will recognize it (if at all) in the form of Burt Lancaster, swooping around the ballroom floor in Visconti's great movie. It's wonderful fun but it is doubly misleading. Lancaster persists in our mind as the picture of what we want an aristocrat to be: lean and strapping, dignified and austere. A careful reading of the novel will remind us that this was never quite what di Lampedusa had in mind: his own fictional account of his princely great-grandfather is far more nuanced and ironic. Yet even in the novel, something of the hero remains. Turn now to the first page of the photo insert after page 114: here we see the prince himself, Giulio Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa. And what an unsettling revalation emerges. He is sturdy (fat?) and he projects an air of dignity. Or tries to: but on anything more than a glance, we see that he is shy, tentative, and perhaps half bewildered at his own position. And the muttonchop sideburns: perhaps they made sense in his time, but for the contemporary observer, they can't be anything more than absurd. Tactfully but inescapably, Gilmour in his text acknowledges the truth of the portrait. We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)

About this title

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 edition

• Publisher: The Harvill Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1860462219
• ISBN 13: 9781860462214
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256