New Light on ‘The Leopard’

A review of a novel about the writing of a novel may seem too derivative—but when the novel being novelised is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s mordant 1958 masterpiece The Leopard much could, and should, be forgiven.

Luckily, nothing needs to be forgiven in Steven Price’s utterly convincing evocation of the brilliantly cultured and ironically introspective Sicilian prince who wrote so unforgettably about Sicily, and by extension all Europe, during the Risorgimento—when aristocratic, Catholic and pastoral tradition met middle-class, nationalist and technological modernity, and proved tragicomically unequal to the challenge. Although set in the 1860s, and written in the almost equally remote 1950s, it is essentially timeless, dealing with perennial dilemmas—age versus youth, retrospection versus progressivism, quality versus equality, individuals versus masses.

This review appears in the most recent Quadrant.
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The Leopard concerns the fictionalised…