22. The Leopard: The Greatest Historical Novel Ever Written?

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2:36Dominic Sandbrook: The door opened. Uncle, you're looking wonderful this evening. Black suits you perfectly. But what are you looking at? Are you paying court to death? Tancredi was arm-in-arm with Angelica. Both of them were still under the sensual influence of the dance and were tired. For both of them, death was purely an intellectual concept, a facet of knowledge, as it were, and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed, of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was inner ignorance of this supreme consolation which makes the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old.

3:15Dominic Sandbrook: The latter are nearer the safety exit. Prince, said Angelica. We'd heard you were here. We came to have a little rest, but also to ask you something. I hope you won't refuse it. Her eyes were full of sly laughter. Her hand was resting on Don Fabrizio's sleeve. I wanted to ask you to dance the next mazurka with me. Do say yes now. Don't be naughty. We all know you used to be a great dancer. The prince was very pleased, and fell suddenly quite spry. The Capuchin's crypt indeed. His hairy cheeks quivered with pleasure. The idea of the mazurka rather alarmed him, though. That military dance or heel-banging and turns was not for his joints.

3:58Dominic Sandbrook: To kneel before Angelica would be a pleasure. But what if he found it difficult to get up afterwards? Thank you, my dear girl. You're making me feel young again. I'll be happy to obey you, but not the mazurka. Grant me the first waltz. So hello, everybody. That is a memorable moment from Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa's book, The Leopard, or Il Gattepardo in the original Italian. And it was first published in Milan in 1958. And it's often described as the greatest historical novel ever written. It's set in Sicily during the wars of Italian unification. and it begins in May 1860 with Garibaldi's red shirts or the red shirted volunteers landing in Sicily to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy and then the book ends with a unified Italy under the house of Savoy so it's a book about lots of things it's about historical change and continuity but there's much more than that so much of it is is what's going on beneath the surface it's very sensuous it's a sensuous portrait of Sicily so it's about the smells the sounds, the way it feels but it's also about a man, the declining years of a single aristocrat and this is Don Fabrizio the man in whose head we are in that opening reading and he is the Prince of Selina and his world is changing drastically and he can feel it slowly slipping away and he sort of has a tragic sense of what will come So Dominic, you must have read this book before.

5:31In fact, I know you have because I'm pretty sure you've mentioned it on The Rest is History before.

5:35Dominic Sandbrook: I have, yes, when we're talking about great historical novels. So hi, everybody. I read it years ago. I absolutely love the film adaptation, which was made in 1963 by Lucchino Visconti, who was himself an aristocrat, actually. And it's got Burt Lancaster. He plays the prince and Alain Delon, who plays Tancredi. and my favourite actress of all time, Tabby, Claudia Cardinale. You're a big fan of her artistry. Her artistry is exactly the word. She plays Angelica. And so you've got these three characters in that scene that we did. And Angelica is the product of the sort of rising liberal middle classes.

6:12Dominic Sandbrook: And these are the people who are likely to inherit the reigns of the new Italy, but they also pose a deadly threat to the prince's kind of feudal world. and I thought when I first read it, so that's about 20 years ago, that it was an absolutely brilliant book as a portrait of character, as a portrait of a particular point in time, but also what I liked when I first read it was that it's a meditation on political change or the lack of political change. I saw other things in it this time actually, partly because we're reading in the context of reading so many other wonderful books and I saw sort of similarities to perhaps some quite surprising books that we've done before, not I have to say A Court of Thorns and roses, Tabby.

6:51It's the obvious comparison.

6:53Dominic Sandbrook: But I mean, you said it's a historical novel. It's not just a historical novel, I think. So E.M. Forster, when he first reviewed it, said it's not a historical novel. It's just a novel that happens to take place in history. I think that's a good way of thinking about it. I think if you've got no interest whatsoever in 19th century Italian politics, you can still find this a really beautiful and moving piece of art and a sort of subtle reflection on human nature. What about you, Tabby? What did you make of it when you first read it? I think that that's a really, really good point, because when I first read it, I definitely didn't read it as a historical novel.

7:25I was about 13. I knew nothing about the historical context. It doesn't read like a typical historical saga. So much of it is about kind of the feel. It's about mood and melancholy and continuity or, you know, the break in a cycle. And so that's, it read very much to me as sad nostalgia, the sense of something slipping away. But because I was young, because I was 13, I could see that it was a thing of beauty from the language, which is so elegant and so finely kind of wrought. I didn't remember it very well because I don't think there's actually that not a lot happens. It's kind of a stream of events that run into each other.

8:01So I couldn't remember much of it. And I was always quite interested in the story behind it in Lampedusa himself, because it's kind of legendary now how the book came to be published.

8:12Dominic Sandbrook: Of course. Yeah. And he's a very interesting man. He's a very interesting man. So actually, before we talk about the book itself, let's talk about Lampedusa, because this bloke and how he came to write this book, it is a pretty remarkable story. So his name, you'll see it on the book, is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The slightly confusing thing is that the surname actually is Tomasi, because that's the family. But he is the prince of Lampedusa, which is this island kind of basically in the middle of nowhere, closer to Africa than to Italy. And to give you a bit of background, to give people a bit of background, because this is the story of an aristocratic prince by and you know it's the story of a prince by a prince so giuseppe tomasi himself was born in 1896 in palermo and his family traced their lineage back for centuries they'd been elevated to the aristocracy in the 16th century and then made princes of lampidusa in 1667 and the emblem was a leopard a leopard rampant in the leopard uh fabrizio uh or the narrator says of fabrizio's family that they're basically always been incapable of adding up their expenditure and subtracting their own debts.

9:17Dominic Sandbrook: And this is a portrait of the Tomasi family. They are useless historically, managing their money. And they're just a sort of, they're basically idle wasters for most of history. It's kind of a tale as old as time, often about, you know, people's perception of the aristocracy. Yes, exactly. It is exactly. And of them, only one of them is really notable. And this is the eighth prince, Prince Giulio. He was the leopard author's great grandfather. And he is in some ways the model for Fabrizio, the protagonist of the book. So he loved astronomy. He collected scientific books. He went on trips to see eclipses.

9:53Dominic Sandbrook: Fabrizio is a very alpha character. Yeah. In reality, Prince Giulio was not an alpha character at all. So there's a little bit of, well, we'll talk about how there's a bit of wish fulfillment in Lampedusa's portrait of him. He said, though, in a letter to a friend Lampedusa, that he wrote that he had intentionally kind of exaggerated his impressiveness. Yes, I think so. I think so. Anyway, Prince Giulio died in 1885 and he either didn't leave a will or his wife destroyed the will because she wanted all her children to share, including her daughters, to share the estate equally. And basically the result of this was that the Lampedusa estate had to be divided between nine different children.

10:35Disaster.

10:36Dominic Sandbrook: And it ended up in court, effectively, for the next 60 years. It was in what was called judicial administration. So it's a bit like the estates, the Jandice and Jandice case in Bleak House. Totally is a never ending case where no one ever ends up benefiting because there are so many claimants. So there's all these different claimants are allowed to live in the houses that belong to the Lampardusa family, but they're not allowed to make any money from the estates under the... An embitted commune. Exactly. This is exactly what happens. So I think this obviously lies behind a big theme of the book.

11:09Dominic Sandbrook: we'll talk about this after the break, is the sense of inevitable decline and decay that hangs over the whole thing. This doomed world. I mean, as he's dying, Fabrizio thinks about all the beauties of their estate, the tapestries at Donna Fugata, the almond groves at Ragattisti, the fountain of Afrititi, that these will all be lost forever. And this is obviously what happened to the author's own family. Yeah. However, as David Gilmore says in his brilliant biography of Tomasi de Lampedusa. He says, you know, it's a very familiar story in Sicily, but what made the Lampedusa house different was that at the end of the line, there was one person who remembered and understood the traditions of his family and who was able at the last moment to transform them into literature.

11:54Dominic Sandbrook: And this is Giuseppe. Yeah, so this is Giuseppe. And he grew up in the Lampedusa Palace in the center of Palermo in the early 1900s. and you know it's a crumbling slightly wretched place and he lives there with his parents sort of a father who's been he's sort of disaffected dissatisfied with everything that's happened because of this ongoing legal battle uncles and domestic servants his father was haughty and arrogant it's kind of your typical aristocrat obsessed with horses and feuding essentially yes but his biggest influence was his mother beatrice because his mother So she was also from a Sicilian aristocratic family.

12:32She was a great reader and she owned this tremendous library, had a huge fiction collection from the 17th and 18th centuries. And she, I mean, it's another old story. She totally dominated her son, even after his marriage. And I think it probably had a really bad effect on his marriage. It did, yeah. I mean, unsurprisingly, I think. And then in Sicily, there were always rumors that it was actually her and not him that wrote the leopard. and he found this old manuscript and edited it and then you know yeah which is not true he definitely which is not true which is not true so he grows up in this odd environment and he's a very taciturn boy he has few friends he's definitely not one for kind of games and japes he always strikes me as fairly humorless but then that can't be right because there is a real dark humor i think underlying the leopard yeah he calls himself a boy who loved solitude he liked the company of things more than of people and you can see this right till the end of his life and he divides his time between the crumbling Palermo Palace and then the family country estate.

13:30And this is at Santa Margherita in southwest Palermo. And this is the model for the home in Sicily that Fabrizio loves, and that's Donna Figata. And it's his country estate in the book.

13:42Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. He only goes to school when he's 14. But by then he speaks Italian, French, German, and he wants to read literature at university, but his father thinks that it's not a good idea and he should become a diplomat instead. And it's unclear really whether he ever did go to university. He enrolls in Genoa, probably did some classes in Rome. But then, of course, the First World War breaks out and he's called up and he serves against the Austrians, but then he's captured in 1917. This is an incredible story, isn't it? Him and the Austrians. It is an incredible story. And also, when you read about the kind of man that he was, this seems quite incongruous.

14:18Dominic Sandbrook: Completely. All these things that happened to him. So he's sent to a prisoner of war camp in Hungary. And then amazingly, it's just so bizarre on the way the Austrians allow him, his captors allow him to go on a tour of Vienna. And he claims later that it's because his German A was so brilliant that they were like, you know, bravo, do what you will. But also because they discovered the ducal coronet sewn into his shirts. It's a great story. It's a great story. You know, the Austrians do behave in quite a bizarre way in the first one. Yeah, these are people that love feathered hats. They're going to love a ducal coronet.

14:54They'll forgive anything. But then even better, he actually manages to bribe the camp guards to give him an Austrian uniform. And he manages to escape and gets a train to the Swiss border. Inevitably, he's recaptured. There's always something quite comical about people escaping and then being recaptured in the First World War. But he's well treated. His only punishment is very severe. I don't know how he recovered from this. his only punishment is to reimburse the austrians for his train fare

15:25Dominic Sandbrook: that's so central european it really it really is and have some cake with it and then he's taken back to the camp and escapes again at the end of the world of the war so he's it's very cold it's um yes it is exactly but cold it's but more but but sort of more funner funner yeah funner and more aristocratic exactly um and then after the war though you know this all sounds sort of jolly fun but after the war he does sink into you know lassitude he he has stress he complains about insomnia and nightmares insomnia and nightmares i think those two things kind of happen simultaneously no i don't think so because nightmares happen when you're asleep they do indeed yeah think about it anyway yeah he gets back home he's coming he's can't sleep and yet simultaneously having nightmares, which is peculiar.

16:10Dominic Sandbrook: It's the 1920s. It's very turbulent in Italy. It's what's called the Red Years, so lots of strikes, labour unrest in the countryside. It's the rise of the black shirts, then the advent of Mussolini and fascism. Yeah, it's so ironic, that following on the heels of this great liberal movement. Well, there'd been this sort of great enthusiasm for liberalism beforehand, which we'll talk about in the book, because he's very critical about liberalism. And actually, one of the reasons, And well, he's critical about liberal democracy and whether it can ever work in Italy. He thinks it's brilliant in Britain.

16:43Dominic Sandbrook: He loves Britain and he loves like British politics. He loves British literature. But he says, oh, it will never work in Italy. We can't, you know, liberal democracy can't really take root. And what that means is that or it's all a sham and a pretense. And what that means is that in the 1920s, he's actually kind of fine with the advent of fascism. He sees it as a regrettable necessity. He is never particularly critical of Mussolini. He doesn't like the uniforms. He doesn't like the parades. He doesn't like the violence and the demagoguery. I thought he would find him distasteful. Yeah, I think he finds Mussolini distasteful.

17:20Dominic Sandbrook: But he is not a sort of out-and-out critic by any means. And actually in this period he is just quite detached. He is an aristocrat in Palermo who is lonely. He is quite misanthropic. He, he, he's not very sociable. He's not a good mixer. He's, he's aloof. He's quite disdainful of other people. So here he is, this guy just sort of drifting along in his own little bubble, basically. Yeah. And so, I mean, as is so often the case, he spends much of his time reading. His family call him Il Mostro, so the monster, because he's so ridiculously well read, and in history and literature, and often in original languages, which is remarkable.

18:04yeah and he loves as you said he has a special fondness for english literature which is excellent to hear he's read tristram shandy three times and he adores shakespeare and it's such a i don't know it's such a charming thought that when his comfort blanket in a sense you know for many of us that's sort of harry potter or lord of the rings his comfort blanket is shakespeare but his favorite book of all is um the pickwick papers by charles dickens so like tolstoy and louisa may alcott who

18:28Dominic Sandbrook: also were big fans what is it with the paper papers i don't even think it's that good i don't either it does absolutely nothing for me i don't know maybe it's a time and place thing yeah it must be you know humors change yeah he keeps a copy of it on his bedside table and then he always takes it with him on his travels so and he's constantly rereading it so it's quite a sort of it's kind of a nostalgic thing i think that's lovely and then between 1922 and 1927 his uncle is italian ambassador in london so he visits several times and he goes on these wonderful literary pilgrimages so for example he visits um the bronte's house but he loves he's captivated he obviously has you know quite a romantic spirit underneath it he loves the moors he said they're meant small boundless and bare yeah and then it's in london that he meets a very implausible figure indeed yes his future wife so basically he doesn't up to this point he hasn't been trying to catch because he's just sort of he's quite a sort of he's a solitary awkward figure who just walks around with a massive copy of shakespeare all the time and so cynical sounds like me and so cynical as well i suppose incredibly cynical yeah yeah again something has in common with you and in 1925 at his uncle's house in London he met this woman called Alessandra Wolf who everybody called her Lisi and she is the daughter of an exiled Baltic German baron well actually her father is dead but she's in exile after the Russian revolution she speaks loads of languages she's really into psychoanalysis that's her great passion she had married this Estonian baron but he out to be gay and then she becomes she's divorced from him she and Giuseppe Tomasi become great pals and then they sort of strike up this romantic relationship although it's a romance founded really on intellectual connection rather than I think a physical one so what they will do is they will spend evenings together just reading passages from their favorite authors it's very erotic I well I think that's you don't think that's quite I do think that's nice I think that's lovely i have to say so in 1932 they get married and um this does not really work out well because giuseppe's mother is still on the scene she's very possessive they are two women quarrel and lisi basically after a year says fine i'm out of here and they're still married but she basically goes off to latvia and she hangs around in latvia for the rest of the 1930s and only when latvia is then absorbed into the soviet union does she come back to sicily their relationship generally seems to be pretty distant.

20:54Dominic Sandbrook: There's not a tremendous amount of affection in their letters. I actually read some of their letters yesterday. Oh, did you? And they're quite sweet. Their parts were sweet, but they're certainly not, you know, particularly loving. In a lot of his, he's constantly asking her to get The Leopard published. Can you basically do a load of errands for me? I think that's effectively the fate of any marriage. But then sometimes he'll go, go to the doctor, love. If you've got a letter from your spouse just saying, go to the doctor, you'd be like, come on. Trot down to the therapist. well in um the leopard fabrizio muses about marriage and he describes it as flames for a year ashes for 30 um so tabby there's a warning to you i know that's the fear isn't it yeah so then in 1934 his father dies and he becomes the prince of lampadusa and he now decides to spend most of his time in palermo first in the palace but then it's bombed in the second world war which is also so telling because there's a moment in the book when they're just you know describing the beautiful frescoes and then they say oh but then it would end up being wiped out by sort of a shell made somewhere in america yeah so that cynicism always comes through um and then he moves to a new house in via butera and that is now you tell me an apartment hotel and you say it looks very nice tragically this is exactly the kind of way that i spend my time so basically i fell down a massive rabbit hole obviously look looking up this uh place you can stay in his old house.

22:17Dominic Sandbrook: I think it's the number one rated guest house on TripAdvisor. Yeah. From Lampedusa to TripAdvisor. But to stay in the room where he'd written The Leopard. No, it's true. I was actually speaking to someone the other day that went and saw all of his handwritten manuscripts around there. Oh, wow. That's nice. People kind of see him in the streets of Palermo going for his morning coffee and he described as a large bulky figure, very distinct and shabby, his eyes alert and his leather bag was overloaded with books and confectionery which had to last him for the rest of the day. So cakes and stuff. Cakes and books.

22:50Dominic Sandbrook: I think he's like one of those people that you sometimes meet who's like in a hot day wearing a massive overcoat, sweating. Shuffling along. Shuffling along, looking very shifty and melancholy and carrying a big bag stuffed with coppers of Shakespeare and cakes. That's basically his vibe. I think that's quite chic in a funny way. I suppose so. But then the English painter, Derek Hill, who is a visitor, says he's a very un-Sicilian man He's reticent, retiring, and extremely erudite and intellectual. He looks a bit like T.S. Eliot. He does look like T.S. Eliot. Which I'm sure he would have liked.

23:24Yeah. Yes. He loves T.S. Eliot. And he spends his time chain smoking, drinking water. So there's that famous party spirit coming out to play. And he's just constantly lost in this world of books.

23:34Dominic Sandbrook: But then he does something very shaming, Tabby. It's mortifying, actually. At the beginning of the 1950s, he starts his own book club podcast, effectively. Never stood a chance after that. No. So basically what he does at the Cafe Mazzara in Palermo, which is his favourite hangout, he basically will hold court with some of his younger friends, like, you know, sort of sons of aristocratic families about books. Producers. Yeah, the producers. This is very much my vibe. And Lisi, his wife, says, well, why don't you turn these into a little literature course? And you can, they can, a book group. And they'll turn up every week and they'll sit around, listen to him and he'll talk about books.

24:14I admire this.

24:15Dominic Sandbrook: He's like, this is brilliant. And he really, really gets stuck into it. He writes more than a thousand pages of notes. So that's very Tabitha Syrett. I know. Birds of a feather. He writes all these huge reams and reams of notes about the whole of English literature, from the Venerable Bede to Graham Greene. And he knows he's read everything. So if there's some minor restoration poet that no one in England has heard of, Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa has read him and knows all about him. Yeah. And he gets massively deep into, like us, he goes really deep into the historical background. He loves that.

24:50Dominic Sandbrook: So sometimes his listeners will say, can we actually talk about the book? And he's like, no. Yeah, like ours. We need to do the first half of the podcast about the author's life. Tabby, talk us through some of his highlights because he and I have some of the same tastes. Yeah, so he loves Shakespeare and he likes the same Shakespeare plays as you. So Henry IV, the I, the II. He said that he would sacrifice 10 years of his life for the privilege of meeting Falstaff for an hour, which I think is odd because Falstaff's quite a laugh. No, why is that odd? Because I think of him as not a particular, like, you know, I can't really see him going out drinking with Prince Hal, you know?

25:22Dominic Sandbrook: No, that's true. So they, well, he just thinks, I think, that Falstaff is a brilliant character. But you're right, they're not exactly soulmates. But then he also, he adores Dickens, loves Jane Austen. He loves Wuthering Heights, which is interesting, given, you know, the very first episode of the show. So he kind of buys into the Bronte legend. He said that Emily Bronte had descended down, deep down into the human spirit and had naturally arrived in hell. Scathing. So he's got some very good taste. He also likes modern writers. He loves Conrad, like you, Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene. Yeah.

25:54And he sees Graham Greene as the greatest modern English writer alongside T.S. Eliot. Wow. So he's half right.

26:01Dominic Sandbrook: I think Graham Greene is a good writer, actually, though he's very unfashionable now. I think he's very good. I don't think he's... He's not the greatest. The best, no. Anyway, the question obviously is whether he's ever thought about writing a book himself. Because he's been doing this course in 1953, 1954. And actually 20 years earlier, he had thought about writing a book. Lisi, his wife, said he'd thought of writing historical novels set in Sicily during the Garibaldi period, based on the character of his great-grandfather, the astronomer Giulio di Lampedusa. and he possibly had made a start on this in the 1930s but and if he did any notes or drafts have long since been lost and basically he didn't do it he he was a man who was sunk in passivity and lassitude for almost all of his life so he'd sort of he's the kind of person who would say to you yes well i have thought of writing a book but i've never quite got around to it and i probably never will you know that kind of person yeah but then at the end of 1954 it's like something changes in him like someone's flicked a switch and david gilmore his biographer says it's as though he decided finally to escape from the years of disappointment and to seize basically the opportunity to redeem what he recognized had been a largely wasted life which i think is quite a sad i think that is such a sad line yeah he's basically in his 50s at this point and he just thinks i've wait i've completely wasted he's a very clever man but he's completely wasted his time on earth and i think there's a sense of a ticking clock because he's starting to get breathing he's a massive smoker yeah he started to get breathing problems he will be diagnosed shortly with emphysema and so at the end of 1954 he just thinks to himself okay it's now or never and he starts writing this book and his plan is basically to write the sicilian ulysses so he says i'm going to set it on the day of garibaldi landing in sicily don't worry we'll explain about garibaldi in a little bit um garibaldi landing in sicily and it's going to be 24 hours like ulysses is 24 hours um but then he starts writing and he says i need more than 24 hours so he widens the time frame and then over the next couple of years in cafe mazara his favorite hangout or in his library at home he sits every morning with a blue biro so you know anybody who thinks oh this is a very conservative book this is a book surely written with a fountain pen of the highest quality yes exactly by an aristocrat with a high collar and a sort of yeah yeah palace no he's actually scribbling it with blue biro in this crumbling library and he's very slow and he spends i mean the first chapter alone he's he rewrites and rewrites it it takes him four months and the reason is because he wants to avoid any cliches he's you know spent all his life thinking about books and he wants every single sentence every word to be packed with imagery and with subtlety and with nuance and meaning as well yes which i think it absolutely is and you can see this so so much in the first chapter so it's the one that he spent the longest on he wrote several drafts and it is incredibly lush it's sensuous you know it's these frescoes on the palace ceiling there's this stench of this wounded soldier who crawls into this rose garden and there are ants crawling over his corpse and and it's and it's kind of decorous but so visceral at the same time you know his guts are spilling out onto the soil and there's constantly the sense of something slowly wilting or dying and and you almost get you can almost smell it um and these gorgeous descriptions have kind of got gilded walls and churches or once fine statues and they're all crumbling so it's all kind of fatigue heat and dust and the description of the garden is especially powerful because it really sets the mood so i'll read it scents that were cloying fleshy and slightly putrid like aromatic liquids distilled from the relics of certain saints from a group from a grove beyond the wall came an erotic waft of early orange blossom.

29:50So there you can see he's melding sweet, sensuous scents with decay and death. It's very evocative.

29:58Dominic Sandbrook: There's a bit where he's got these roses from Paris. Description of the roses. And they have turned into enfeebled by the strong if languid pull of Sicilian earth. They have turned into objects like flesh-coloured cabbages, obscene and distilling a dense, almost indecent scent, which no French horticulturist would have dared hope for. The prince put one under his nose and seemed to be sniffing the thigh of a dancer from the opera. So you've got the decay, you've got the sort of cosmopolitan-ness, you've got the beauty, but also the sensuality of the prince. Yeah, there's an eroticism. There's exactly an eroticism.

30:33Dominic Sandbrook: So this is what he's working on. He keeps it quiet all this time for two years. He doesn't mention it to his friends. But then on the 8th of March 1956, he writes in his diary that his histoire son nom his history with no name is finished actually it's not finished because this is what he's done is not the version that we have today and a friend of his comes around that day to talk about books and lampaduce says well what do you think of this and he gives him an exercise book and says what do you think and then it's like the dam has burst and he starts giving it to all his friends look at this what do you think of this i've written a book that's very human i can i can totally see that happening yeah he's delighted with himself i'm quite pleased with it yeah exactly that's exactly what i would do to be honest yeah but i never would be silent about it in the first place so the question is will he find a publisher yeah so in may 1956 he sends it to the very prestigious milan publisher uh mondadori by now it has a name so it's uh il gatto paro so the leopard but not in its finished form it's really just kind of the first two and the last two chapters so it's missing out those middle chapters it's really interesting when you look at how he jigged and rejigged the order of them because the timeline is quite confusing um so the title so gatopardo it doesn't actually mean leopard it means ocelot or serval which is an african wildcat um but he seems to have meant so it's kind of an interesting translation question he seems to have meant leopard because that is the emblem of the family and Fabrizio, Don Fabrizio himself, is a big, handsome, arrogant figure and he's very leonine.

32:09So Leopard suits him. So the publishers, Mondadori, they don't reply until December and then, shockingly, they turn it down. The truth is, I think, they just don't know what to make of it. It is quite an unusual book.

32:23Dominic Sandbrook: The trend in Italian fiction would be to be very, very neorealist, all about the working classes. Italian culture in the 1950s is very politicised. it's very very i mean particularly on the left people who command the commanding heights of letters in italy in the 1950s tend to be marxists and this book they look at this like what is this like this book about a prince in sicily in 1860s is he lauding the aristocracy as well they're wondering exactly exactly but they do think it has some merit and interesting i read um his his adopted son geo wrote about it and he said that they had meant to send him kind of not the standard letter rejection letter they'd meant to say oh it is good but maybe this but maybe that but it just got lost in translation and there he ended up getting kind of the standard rejection anyway he carries on writing he produces the middle chapters but in early 1957 he's been diagnosed with lung cancer and he dies in his sleep in the early hours of the 23rd of july and he's only 60 and in his last will he said that there were only three people in the world that he loved and that was his wife his adopted son and his um this his adopted son's fiance which is quite sad that is quite sad but that's not quite the end of the story is it because about a year later in the spring of 1958 his widow lisi gets a call the publishers feltron ellie actually decided they want to publish it and there's a they have a contemporary literature series and this run by a novelist called giorgio basani quite a well-known novelist in italy he rings her up to discuss it and she says well actually what you've got is not all of it he wrote more like i think there's a chapter about a ball which is such a glorious chapter imagine if i hadn't been there i know she says you know would you would you have liked there to be a chapter about a ball and persani says brilliant line a ball is always a good thing but how could one get hold of a chapter now and she says well i think he was writing one before he died i don't know where it is and she searches for us and she asks around and her sister who lives in rome says oh there's some typewritten thing that i did for him that's in the house in rome somewhere unbelievable anyway his sister digs it out gives it to this bloke basani and basani reads it and he's you know he's excited oh great he wrote about a ball and then he's like oh no this is absolutely terrible like there's it's like incompetently written every second word is misspelled right and he says to uh lisi and her sister was there a handwritten original of this type script they do some more digging and basically underneath the sofa or something they find the handwritten notes and basani realizes that uh lisi's sister had completely she was obviously a terrible typist and had missed out loads of words yeah put in no punctuation and so the original was much better and he says brilliant we can put this ball chapter so the ball was what we but that's the scene we read at the beginning is from the ball chapter so he puts that in the book the book is published in Milan in the end of 1958.

35:18Dominic Sandbrook: Now, lots of sort of avant-garde left-wing critics in Italy, sort of literary intellectuals, think, oh, this is a shocking book. It's very reactionary in its style and in its content. So there's a fashionable novelist at the time called Vasco Pratolini who wrote, for the last 30 years we have strained to advance our literature. Lampedusa has put us back 60 years. That's clearly such a ridiculous thing to say. What can he possibly mean yeah it wouldn't help us see he's they are they are keen you know they're they are keen to write experimental politically engaged you know very 1950s kind of stuff and what he's basically saying is how dare somebody write a really good book that is old-fashioned but it gets good reviews in some other newspapers like la stampa very prestigious paper in italy and then it wins the top italian fiction award the strega prize it starts to sell loads of copies becomes a word of mouth hit i think particularly important is the fact it is still quite deferential to britain and france at this point culturally especially france and in france it gets brilliant reviews the top french marxist louis aragon says it's one of the great novels of this century one of the greatest novels of all time and over time the italian critics sort of fall into line so for example there was a very eminent sicilian writer called leonardo sciaccia and he had initially said it's a terrible book it's very down on sicily i don't like it it is down on sicily it is down on sicily he's right about that but then 20 years later sciaccia recanted lampaduce was unfortunately right and we were wrong he says which is i think big of him it's very big of him and when you look at the sales the critical reputation of the leopard it is by far the most successful italian book of the 20th century it's got a rare thing of a book that is simultaneously a great critical hit as in anybody who likes literature who fancies themselves as quite highbrow will tell you they love the leopard but at the same time ordinary readers love it too so it's it's regularly voted the most beloved italian novel of all time

37:32welcome back to the book club so before the break we were speaking about giuseppe tomasi de lampedusa and now we are going to turn to the work itself his great work the leopard so dominic we kick off in may 1860 what's going on give us a little bit of historical context yes a little

37:49Dominic Sandbrook: bit of history so the book opens in may 1860 in the middle of the great historical drama of italian history really the risorgimento the resurgence when the book opens there is no country called italy there's a geographical location called italy but on the italian peninsula is basically just this mosaic of different states belonging to different people so the selena family i hear our hero and his um and his family they live on the island of sicily which is part of the kingdom of the two sicilies which is basically the kingdom naples and naples is ruled by the bourbon dynasty So this is a sort of offshoot of the ruling house of Spain and indeed previously of France.

38:29Dominic Sandbrook: Sicily itself is very rural, very backward. People work on the land and this is a feudal system dominated by a handful of rich aristocratic families. But at the beginning of the book, this world is under threat because Italian unification is underway and it's spearheaded by the rich northern kingdom of Sardinia, confusingly ruled by the house of Savoy with its capital in Turin but people often describe it as Piedmont. So basically it's four different names. When I was reading up on this yesterday I had to get off a map. Let's just say Sardinia for short. So they are pushing a project of Italian unification where they want all the states to come under the rule of the kings of Sardinia.

39:12Dominic Sandbrook: And in May 1860 the Sardinians sent an expedition under the revolutionary nationalist firebrand Garibaldi with the red shirts to land in Sicily. It's the expedition of a thousand because there's about a thousand of them. They land at Marsala on the 11th of May. They fight their way inland. Fighting breaks out in Palermo at the end of the month. It's sort of local, there's an uprising against the Bourbons. By June, Palermo has surrendered. The Bourbons have been kicked out and Garibaldi has won. And that's the backdrop to the first couple of chapters of the book. And at the time, this was seen as an incredible feat.

39:52Dominic Sandbrook: Basically, Garibaldi, in his red shirts, had landed. They had defeated the armies of the kingdom of the two Sicilies and toppled the regime. And this inspired great excitement and adulation on kind of liberal types, you know, sort of people who believe in progress and people who are kind of well-meaning and don't want to, you know, they're progressives, I suppose. and all over the world people are very excited about Garibaldi, hence the biscuits. Rubbish biscuits. No, Garibaldi's a great biscuit. Tammy, what? I disagree. You don't like a Garibaldi biscuit? It does nothing for me. Well, we're going to have to pursue this later because otherwise we'll run out of time.

40:28Dominic Sandbrook: But surely we could do a live biscuit tasting. Yeah, with rum. Where's the rum come from there? That's a bit left field. I don't know. I just thought that would be a nice touch. So the autumn of 1860, Sicily holds a referendum, a plebiscite, on whether to join this new kingdom of Italy under Sardinian rule. And this is what Fabrizio is thinking about in chapter three of the book, this plebiscite. And in the book, people who've read the book will know, the plebiscite is rigged. And in Dona Fugata, their country estate, the result is 512 votes yes and zero votes against. And Fabrizio's kind of huntsman retainer, Don Ciccio, is absolutely furious about this because he says, I voted no and no one counted my vote.

41:13Dominic Sandbrook: And actually, this is the reality because in Santa Margherita, in reality, which was the model for the country estate, there were 999 electors in Santa Margherita and 993 of them supposedly voted yes. And actually, when you look at the whole island of Sicily, the official figures show that 99.8 % of them voted yes. And then three quarters of the districts of the island, nobody at all voted no. and this was obviously totally untrue. Yeah, it's pretty corrupt. Anyway, Sicily joins the new kingdom of Italy and everybody who supports this says, oh, this is absolutely going to be brilliant. So in the book, the prince has an accountant, a kind of steward called Russo, who's very much in favour of all this, who says to the prince, we'll have liberty, security, lighter taxes, ease, trade.

42:01Dominic Sandbrook: Everything will be better. But obviously anyone reading this book in the 1950s would know that things did not just get better. Basically, what happened was the feudal elites didn't want to accept the changes that had come in. There were lots of revolts by the peasants because the peasants complained they were having to pay more taxes under the new regime. They didn't like the northerners. I mean, Sicilians still do not like what they see as the imposition of the heavy hand of, you know, the Italian mainland. And this is actually the era after the Risorgimento when you see the rise of the mafia.

42:37Dominic Sandbrook: because the old feudal order is breaking down. The local elites get these companies of armed men to defend their estates and stuff. And these over time evolve into the first mafia clans. This is what explains the very grimly ironic tone of the book whenever Lampedusa is talking about politics because his readers will know that Sicily doesn't move into the shiny utopian future, that the future for Sicily is stagnation and violence, And, you know, his characters are often trapped by their own idealism. Yeah, because they don't know. They can't see all this coming. They don't know this. They don't know what we know.

43:15Yeah.

43:16Dominic Sandbrook: Although one of them does know. Yeah. And this is a character who can see into the future because he's a skeptic and because he's a kind of small C conservative and he is so cynical. So he thinks, well, nothing ever changes. And if it does change, it gets worse. and this is the guy who speaks for Lampedusa, who is the protagonist of the book, Don Fabrizio. And Tabby, I think you described him as the sexiest character in fiction. He's a very, very attractive character because despite the fact that he has this incredible kind of foresight or insight into the fact that his world, the world as he knows it, is declining and fading away, he kind of takes it in his stride.

43:56He maintains his sort of sense of mastery. He's never embittered. he's languidly laconic about the whole thing and he's a very sensual character so in the first chapter he visits a brothel in palermo after dinner and it's kind of a sign of his dry slightly ironic character that he makes his um kind of confessor his priest father perone come with him yes he drops him off which is so amusing yeah and then there's a very funny scene when um the priest asks to speak to him and he's having you know he's his size is constantly emphasized he's a very like leonine man he's massive yeah but not fat and and there's a scene where he's having a bath and he's and then he invites the priest in he stands up and he's completely naked and this

44:40Dominic Sandbrook: poor little priest is kind of awed by exactly by the size of him the vastness of him yeah but this first chapter it also gives you an insight into his reflectiveness and his self-loathing he thinks about marianina so she's the young woman at the brothel and he feels sad at the thought of that man-handled youthful flesh that resigned that resigned lubricity and he thinks of himself as a pig just a pig but so he's never one thing at once and and he remains to me anyway a very central figure right to the end even though he's kind of depleted and exhausted and apathetic and he's intelligent enough to see that his world is dying but he's cultivated enough to observe that death with kind of beautiful serenity and enduring charm and his spiritual exhaustion is kind of more appalling thanks to this physical size because he is it's it's like he's a he's a god who's been made into a mortal he doesn't belong in the human world where it's with its indignities and its vulgarities and its politics that don't really matter and this is why he loves astronomy you know something that dwarfs human affairs it's constant and it's ordered yeah there's a sense of him being above the petty grind isn't there the shabby compromises yeah politics and when he's actually invited to join the new senate of the kingdom of italy he says no it's not for me and he's yearning for something he's got this kind of there is a definite yearning to him isn't it there's yearning for something more profound more metaphysical hence the stars in a way he is yearning for the old age you know when he goes to Don Fugata he's reassured by the peasant's kind of obsequiousness it reassures him but at the same time there's always something more because he's much more than just a mortal man in a sense for instance there's a scene when he's talking to Father Peroni about astronomy and his own observatory and you know he sends reports to foreign scientists and he explains the reason he loves stars is they were distant they were omnipotent and at the same time they were docile to his calculations just the contrary to humans always too near so weak and yet so quarrelsome and at the end of the book on his deathbed he thinks about the rare moments in his life that he was truly happy um and these hours of of being in the observatory are among them and when he got a letter complimenting him on some calculations that he did on hayley's comet or something yeah and then when he got a medal from the sore bone and the earthly sphere is never quite enough for him well that's the thing he's a complicated a character there's different sides to him he's the patriarch he's a man of flesh and blood he's an intellectual but i think the thing that so makes him so satisfying as a character for me cynical people are often very good observers of others yeah you know they're watching for what's going on under the surface and as a very cynical aloof person he is a brilliant observer of his world and of himself and i was thinking about this sort of reflectiveness of him and the way in which this is done through this kind of stream of consciousness style yeah i was thinking how funny it is because we did Mrs.

47:38Dominic Sandbrook: Dalloway by Virginia Woolf a few weeks ago and I know there are some readers who really dislike they dislike even the thought of Mrs. Dalloway and even the thought of Virginia Woolf it annoys them it annoys them and yet they would say of this book oh it's absolutely brilliant I love this leopard oh one of the great books body body blah but actually the style and the techniques I think are not so different so Lampedusa who liked you know a new Virginia Woolf's work. Flashbacks, memory, stream of consciousness, everything filtered through the subjectivity of one central character, then passages of very lush description.

48:19Dominic Sandbrook: You know, this is the kind of thing that you get in the kind of modernist writers of the 1920s, and kind of fragmented, a fragmented narrative that's made up of a series of set pieces. Jumbled timelines. Exactly, jumbled timelines. You know, Lampedusa is clearly modelling this on some of the writers, the 20th century writers that he's read but because it's set in the past because it's by a man about a man and because it involves like garibaldi and whatnot people don't seem to notice and it's by an aristocrat about an aristocrat in the last years of his of his age really in a sense yeah so the other question about fabrizio is actually whether he is lampaduce himself so we said before that he the model for him is prince julio lampaduce's ancestor the astronomy and whatnot a lot of lampaduce's friends said you have given don fabrizio your own personality but i think it's funny that he wrote that himself yes exactly people are saying that i remind them of the dashing and extremely sexy yeah there are different so the pessimism yeah the sardonic dry wit the skepticism about human nature the introvert politics yeah the solitariness the politics, all of those things they have in common.

49:30Dominic Sandbrook: They're also both very passive, actually. So we said that Don Fabrizio is an alpha male, but he actually doesn't really do anything. At one point, he's described in the book as watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make any move towards saving it. So he's just watching, but not acting. Both of them feel that they're trapped between two worlds. so the prince says at one point very celebrated line i belong to an unlucky generation swung between the old world and the new and i find myself ill at ease in both which is very lampadusa but well i mean obviously you're extreme you're just as cynical as he is tubby so the portrait of a very very sexy sensual charismatic character this is basically lampadusa as he would like to have been yeah i think that's i think that's quite touching you know for an awkward shy person who loses himself and kind of the great deeds of others in books of course there's a little going to be a little bit of wish fulfillment yeah of course what's about the other characters yeah there were two other main characters that kind of grab the reader's attention and the first of these is Tancredi so this is his nephew in the book Don Fabrizio's nephew and Lampedusa was said to have based Tancredi on his young cousin Giochino Lancer and he adopted him before his death and he was extremely fond of him I was reading a lot of his letters to him last night and they're they're quite touching um and he was one of the young men that went to lampaduce's book groups and in a letter to a friend he wrote that tancredi was morally and physically geo you know because he's funny and he's charming and idealistic and i've never seen the film but who plays him in the film in the film he's played by alain dalon and he is so handsome so very handsome and so dashing yeah he's really really smooth and charismatic in a slightly lounge lizard way but i think that's how he is in the book it's a bit too smooth i think that's why tancrede is actually a brilliantly complex character because when i first read the book i found him very attractive you know charismatic excitable full of energy charming sinewy lithe wicked totally my type i think the sinewy and lithe i think that's your projecting on that i don't think that's in the book but he's a kind of this slim figure isn't he maybe that is in my head god i'm fantasizing about tanker 80 but then when i read it this time i found him much less attractive and also he wears that sexy eye patch that's automatically yeah of course and other long when he wears the eye patch does look very dashing this time i read it i read him as a much more the survivor he's a better survivor than the rest of his class so while he's milking his own class and his uncle for money he's turning his back on them and he's infiltrating the new world so via you know he he joins um daribaldi and he you know will learn through his marriage he's a survivor he is a bit of a social climber he's a great adapter and this is why in the book his role is also symbolic because he represents elements of the old guard who have embraced the cause of italian unification but you never really know with tancredi if it's because he's genuinely idealistic or if it's because he knows this is the only way to survive because that's the thing i think he's quite naughty and quite calculating and that's why don fabrizio both admires and distrusts him because you know at least he knows that tancredi is the only part of him that will survive in the new world but the way that tancredi really lets himself down is he's quite cruel and insensitive and particularly to his cousin concetta so she is the princess daughter yeah and she's and she's very serious isn't she very pious very pious she's completely in love with him she's totally in love with him she's you know she's very upset by the eye patch and stuff because i don't know why she's yeah very excited well he destroys she should lean into it he destroys her entire life by telling an inappropriate yeah a bad anecdote you know she is born at the worst time because she's going to live to see everything that she knew disappear around her but she's still a part of it a bit like lampadusa so the antidote that destroys Concetta's life so Tancredi and his mates capture a convent and the elderly nuns are frightened that they'd be raped and then one of Tancredi's friends shouts nothing doing sisters we'll be back when you have some novices it's great banter and then they leave the nuns with a quote their tongues hanging out Tancredi is implying that you know they're lusting after these lovely young men the nuns were the nuns were which is poor from tancredi i think i think all of this is poor from tancredi yeah but then concetta who you know weeps on her way to mass is so appalled by this whereas her love rival and foil angelica who i was voicing in the opening reading and she represents everything that's new and predatory and um she says what fine lads you must have been how i wish i'd been there with you and i you know you so know that girl that jumps on the bandwagon with the boys because she kind of wants to be fancied by them a little bit and then tancredi says had you been there signora we'd have had no need for novices so it's top wooing there yeah angelica loves this angelica loves it yeah and concetta's horrified and she bursts into tears and she storms off and i actually feel very sorry for concetta i think hers is a very sad trajectory so what about angelica so let's talk about angelica so the important thing about her is she's from a different class she's from a lower class she's the daughter of this rising corrupt businessman stroke politician called don carlodgero sedara and so she is the representative of the middle classes but she she she goes after what she wants which is tancredi with you know sensuality and her attractiveness and she you know that's why her relationship with Tancredi is quite is a very cynical portrayal of love because they're both what they both want something from the other one they're in love with each other but it's not love and they're excited by the performance and the possibility of what they could achieve together whereas Concetta loves him truly and kind of emotionally she's in love with being in love but she's not in love with him isn't she Angelica?

55:42He'll give her a title he'll give her validation and she will give him a passage into the future.

55:50Dominic Sandbrook: Well she'll give him money I mean she's bringing loads of money and she's gorgeous so they're both prizes for each other. They see each other as a prize rather than as a person I think so you know when he tells his terrible anecdote, his rape anecdote which is poor from him and she laughs and in the book she gives this she describes it as giving a strident laugh but in the film which I love she gives it's Claudia Cardinale and she who is I have to say the most wonderful actress to me and she gives this incredibly husky dirty laugh at this anecdote oh my god and uh this is the clue to her personality it is there is a kind of earthiness and sensuality to her and actually just on the you know it's easy to be very cynical about the romance between them but there's a chapter which is actually brilliantly done in the film when they are um exploring the palace and it's got loads it's got so many disused rooms it's all very dusty you know they're unlocking doors and this the two of them will go off on these expeditions together and i think these are without sort of betraying myself too much and getting into therapy i think these are this this is a very very erotic scene no no in truth it actually is you know in a book that is so much about sort of the passing of time and the law and loss it's a book that's it's it's a passage that's full of movement and excitement and possibility this is not a book overflowing with possibility it tends to be about loss but the but the eroticism of it comes in the fact that the possibility it's possibility but not actuality because they are exactly they are simmering with desire for each other as they explore the palace and they will have a snog or whatever but they can never fully act on their desires so as lampaduce says the dangers of stopping the game and drawing the prize became more and more pressing for both in the end they searched no longer but went off absorbed into the remotest rooms those from which no cry could reach anyone from the outside world but there never would be a cry only invocations and low whimpers yeah they would both lie close but innocent pitying each other so they can't bring themselves to kind of go the whole hog, as it were.

57:58Dominic Sandbrook: But there's this sort of simmering electricity between them, if electricity can simmer. It's so sexy from Lampedusa. It really is. It is sexy. Thank you. It's a very sexy book. But then that is also what's so kind of creeping about it or depressing about it is that we get kind of a look into their future. And when it finally is realised and the possibility becomes reality and we kind of learn that they end up being quite unhappy together. And this is the best that it will ever be for them. The bit when they hadn't quite captured each other. It's the old thing about the chase and wanting what you can't have.

58:37Dominic Sandbrook: It's one of the best examples in literature, I think, of the chase. Yeah. So this is another example of how this is not just a historical novel because what he's doing here is a very, very modernist sort of trick of puncturing the illusions of the present by suddenly abruptly throwing forward into the future. So he will say, you're absolutely loving this. You know, you've immersed yourself. You're wallowing in the eroticism of these passages. You're tricked into thinking it's a love story for a moment as well. And then suddenly he says, these would be the best days ever for Angelica and Jack Grady.

59:08Dominic Sandbrook: Lives later to be so variegated, so erring against the inevitable background of sorrow. But of that they were still unaware in their pursuit of a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. You're like, what? This is all going to go, it's going to turn to ashes. And he goes on to say, when they were old and uselessly wise, their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret. So he's really kind of stabbing your romantic illusions about this couple. And that's what he does throughout is he'll set things up and then he'll say, in the future, of course, they would end up hating each other and they would all be incredibly corrupt and miserable.

59:46But it's the same with that, with the wonderful ball scene, which is glorious. It's kind of the climax of the novel, and it's when Angelica asks the prince to dance, and for a moment he feels virile again, and then it's punctured almost immediately. So from the ceiling, and this is what I was referring to earlier, from the ceiling the gods reclining on gilded couches gaze down smiling, and inexorable as the summer sky. They thought themselves eternal, but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943.

1:00:13Dominic Sandbrook: That's such a good sentence, because that bit where he, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. yeah it's romance and it's classicism and it's and it's eternal and then it's like the mundane yeah industrial quality of what punctures it and that's is also what kind of the book is about he's not saying that aristocracy are great or that the middle classes are terrible he's you know pretty negative about both but he's saying you know this mundane order of of kind of the bourgeoisie or whatever come up yes and they take on the guys of the aristocracy they put on their uniforms but they're made of you know nothing is getting better no it's just no it's continuity change is continuity pittsburgh is replacing palermo that's basically the sort of if you could sum up the book in a few words um and actually that you see the film doesn't have any of that at all because it doesn't have the narrative voice so you don't have the bomb in pittsburgh pennsylvania you don't have it throwing forward to tankeridi and angelica the angelica's future their disappointment when they finally get together actually the film just wallows in the in the glamour and it's a wonderful film for that but it doesn't have that extra layer i think yeah and the fact that when he looks around it's like a funeral pyre the ball scene isn't it magnificent for the last time and he literally by dancing with angelica kind of embraces his death and he looks around him and all the faces around him are kind of sad or ghoulish or and you couldn't convey that and i think i mean you mentioned the the the beginning the first chapter the sort of sense of decay and the sort of putrid rottenness of the garden as well as the beauty and the sensuality and i think that runs through the whole book the idea well there's a couple of ideas about decline or change so the first idea i guess is that sicily can never change because sicily of all places is uniquely resistant to change.

1:02:06Dominic Sandbrook: It's trapped. It's trapped by its own history and by its own culture, I guess. Yeah. And this is captured in the prince's meeting with the northern politician, Chavalli, who comes to ask him to join the new Senate. So first of all, he says, we'll never change because we've been so deeply marked by colonialism, you know, wave upon wave of different conquerors in Sicily. So he says, we are old, Chavalli. We're very old. for over 25 centuries we've been bearing the weight of superb heterogeneous civilizations all from outside none made by ourselves none that we could call our own we're as white as you are and as the queen of england and yet for 2500 years we've been a colony i don't say that in complaint it's our fault but we're even so we're worn out and exhausted but then he says something that's slightly different he says we'll never change because there's something uniquely sicilian that makes it impossible.

1:02:57It's the barren landscape, the blistering heat. It's the atmosphere of Sicily, the climate. Forces that have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than alien pressure and varied invasions. This landscape which knows no mean between sensuous sag and hellish drought.

1:03:16Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, and that's, he's saying basically we've become, we're lazy. He says we're arrogant. You know, we think Sicily is perfect and we don't want to improve. and you know change happens but basically people you know generations of people have tried to change sicily and the change always is evanescent and it collapses yeah because sicily is enduring and it's old and it's you know nothing will ever be different that's this is fatalism i guess that he has new beginnings are an illusion humans are fundamentally self-interested nothing can be done So just like he is, he passively rolls with it. So that's the idea that nothing ever changes and everything is the same.

1:03:54Dominic Sandbrook: But then the other idea, which is slight tension and contradiction to that, is actually things are changing, but they're just getting worse. So people who write, you know, whenever somebody writes an article in Unheard about the leopard, which seems to happen like every month, and they'll quote the leopard and they'll say, they'll quote this line from Tancredi when Tancredi says to the prince, Why am I backing the revolution? Because if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. Such a famous line, isn't it? And anybody who's like a sort of think of themselves as a thinking conservative, I'm a cerebral conservative.

1:04:31Dominic Sandbrook: They will always love quoting this line, like some things have to change. You know, you're David Cameron or something and you're introducing gay marriage or whatever it might be. And you're doing so precisely so that things can stay the same. Stay the same. Exactly. But Fabrizio doesn't think that things are staying the same. He thinks things are actively decaying. And actually, Lampedusa clearly thinks that to some degree, because this character we mentioned, Angelica's father, Don Collogio Rosidara, the guy who wears the wrong coat to dinner, which is a terrible thing. Terrible. He's dressed in an inappropriately fancy coat, a tailcoat.

1:05:06That is embarrassing, to be fair.

1:05:07Dominic Sandbrook: Anyway, he's corrupt. He's ambitious. He's small-minded. He's slimy. He's mean-spirited. Don Fabrizio feels a loathing for him at the ball, actually. He says it feels a loathing for him, a loathing for the rise of this man and a hundred others like him, their obscure intrigues, their tenacious greed and avarice. And this is bound up with the sense of death that hangs over the palaces. And the prince makes the same point to the northern politician Chevalier. He says, things will be different, but worse. We were the leopards and lions, but those who will take our places will be little jackals and hyenas.

1:05:41Dominic Sandbrook: So on the one hand, Sicily is always the same. But then on the other hand, actually, Sicily is getting worse because the people who succeed us are corrupt and vicious and, you know, all of this. But you can see why liberals would say, oh, that's because the people coming up are not of the old order. You know, they're new people. They're kind of industrious or whatever it may be. Yeah, of course. They would say this is the snobbery. This is the snobbery of the old elite. But Lampedusa, he did personally disdain political liberalism. I mean, you can undoubtedly see that. He called it play acting, a noisy romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes.

1:06:20So obviously the great liberal totem in Italy is the risorgamento. But in The Leopard, this is basically, it's all just a fraud. You know, you see that in the count up of the plebiscite. And that's why it's so important in the story. It's a symbol of the dishonesty and the corruption of the whole project, which is seemingly introducing kind of a utopian new future where everything will be different and there'll be equality. And Lampedusa is saying that it never meant anything. It was just corrupt.

1:06:47Dominic Sandbrook: So the prince reflects that Italy was born that night when they all voted to join the kingdom of Italy and the plebiscite. But he says, the same night, something died, a newborn babe, good faith, just the very child that should have been cared for most, whose strengthening would have justified all the silly vandalisms. But I mean, it's a fair point. You know, he's basically saying Italy was born corrupt. It was born a fraud, meretricious, because they falsified the results of the referendum and they just couldn't allow people to choose freely. From the very beginning, it was tainted. So there's a sense that the decline and the decay are built in politically.

1:07:25Dominic Sandbrook: So when I first read this book, I thought a lot about the politics and the history of it. But reading it this time, I think particularly because you know we've done so many books that are quite reflective in this show not least mrs dalloway which i thought of a lot when i was reading this yeah mrs dalloway rather like this is a book about death and death runs through this book from the beginning lampadusa writes it at a point when he's feeling that time is ticking he's about to be diagnosed with lung cancer his own death is very much on his mind and i think even though he might have started it thinking i'm going to write a book about the 1860s.

1:08:01Dominic Sandbrook: I think ultimately this is a book about a man who's coming to terms with his own mortality. And also who feels that his whole life has been slightly futile. Yes, that his life has been wasted, really. Exactly like Lampedusa's life. So the very first sentence of the book is the last line of the rosary, isn't it? Nunc et in hora mortis nostri, amen. Now and at the hour of our death, amen. The very first line. Then the palace is compared to a cemetery. It literally smells of death because of the body of this dead soldier that they found in the garden. Fabrizio says to Chevalier, the guy from the north, all Sicilian self-expression, even the most violence, is really a wish fulfillment.

1:08:42Dominic Sandbrook: It's a hankering for oblivion, a shooting and knifing, a hankering for death, a languor, a exotic ices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again. But basically, I mean, this is the kind of thing that outsiders love to say about Sicily. But actually, this is a Sicilian himself saying it. Yeah. We're in love with death and everything is bound up with this kind of longing for oblivion and this awareness of our own mortality. And even when the prince goes to the ball, you know, it's everywhere. Like, you know, it's in the first sentence that you say. It's in the roses. And then at the ball, he sees a priest rushing to give somebody the last sacraments.

1:09:21And he spends the whole thing. it's why it's so conflicting because you have this beautiful radiant room and this beautiful girl and dancing and sensuality but he spends the whole thing feeling like slightly like he's standing on the outside as if he's sort of walking towards his own death yeah and then he goes into the library and he sees a picture of a dying man so that's you know the lines from tancredi that i read at the beginning black suits you perfectly but what are you looking at are you playing court to death and obviously as is typical for the young death isn't a reality it's a concept yes and then even when he walks home under the stars he passes a wagon carrying balls from this slaughterhouse blood dripping onto the cobble so again it's that same contrast between the decorous stately man well-dressed walking from a ball and there's blood on the cobblestones exactly and this is where the

1:10:05Dominic Sandbrook: film ends so i know you haven't seen the film but the film ends right here with him walking home on the cobblestones but actually the book has two more chapters that actually hammer this point home so the first suddenly the book we're no longer in the 1860s we're in 1883 and Fabrizio is dying. And he is thinking about those times when he has been happy. And these times, the sort of flecks of gold or something they've described as in his otherwise kind of humdrum and disappointing life, they are connected with the different sides of his personality. So they're his family and especially his friendship with Tancredi.

1:10:39Dominic Sandbrook: They're his sensuality. So, you know... The brothels. Yes, the cravats. You remember the cravats that he's worn? I think you will think over your greater suits when the time comes. Yeah, I might. You think so? I don't think I think about suits. I think about my greatest podcasts, maybe. Oh, do you have more in the locker? Yeah. There you have to come, Tubby. Oh, I pity you. And then he thinks about astronomy, how much is his intellectual quest for something fixed, for something meaningful, which is the stars. That exactly, that actually matters, greater than meaningless politics and foibles. Yeah.

1:11:16Dominic Sandbrook: and you loved the scene didn't you you love this chapter i do but but as in i love it in the way that i think it's very sad and quite sort of moving because the way that this great man faces death with this very serene mathematical sort of sense of perusal like he's flicking through it and it's very accepting he's laconic as always um and and his realization of the insignificance of it all and how it as it turns out politics change none of it matters it's just death and also the fact that it all happens in this kind of shabby hotel and this is a man that has come from gilded palaces and rosaries it's really very sad about it but the i think the bit that i was disturbed by even more than that is the final chapter and i remember even when i was 13 and it is the most blackly ironic and skeptical scene of all it's a very depressing note to go out on in some ways so conchetta and her sister's now in their 70s and they're withered spinsters and they're quarreling over their inheritance and they're brooding on the past and all they've done with their lives is collect images of death, essentially.

1:12:20You know, photos of relatives and friends who are dead. The stuffed dog, Benedico. And that's actually Lampedusa said in the letter to Gio. He said, oh, he's the heart of the novel. And relics from the past.

1:12:32Dominic Sandbrook: Right, but they're kind of mad. They've basically been collecting fake relics. The finger bones of the great, great, great, I don't know. Yeah, some saint or whatever. Duke of Selina or whatever. Yeah. And then we learn that Tancredi, with all his vibrancy and dashing youth, he's been dead a long time. And he just became another corrupt politician. And his life with Angelica, you know, so full of sensuous promise, has just been tempestuous and interrupted. Interrupted, meaning they've had affairs, they've had separations. So, you know, he almost put, there was a chapter that he excluded from the edition of the book that he tried to, you know, that he was sending out when he died to get published.

1:13:11Yeah. And it was a scene of, I think it's the prince or the princess rushing to stop Angelica from embarking upon her first affair to save. No way. Tancredi's feelings. Yeah.

1:13:22Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. And the most shocking thing, given how much I love Angelica, is that she's getting old. I mean, that's fair enough. Lampedusa is cruel to her, I think. He says the illness which was to transform her into a wretched spectre three years later was already active but still secreted deep within her. It's horrible. So basically, you know, she's obviously got cancer, but she doesn't know it when we see her for the last time. She takes a little bit to the garden at the beginning. The beautiful flowers which have the seeds of their kind of rottenness and, you know, within them and about to wither and die.

1:13:58Dominic Sandbrook: and that's true of Angelica too that she has become you know a corrupt and meretricious and whatnot but also she's on the she's become rotten and this was a point when I slightly thought he was overdoing it that the cynicism and the emphasis that everything is rotten and everything is putrid I thought come on give them a would you never give your characters a tiny bit of true happiness or of a lightness as well as the shade I think he would say though that's just the real world though isn't it what is lit i've literally found a writer even more cynical than i am and i never thought that would happen um what about the last image of the book that's a really strange image so basically the church authorities come and they say well these relics are fake you have to throw them away and concetta is feeling very empty and miserable and she says um okay get rid of the dog get rid of the stuffed dog which had been fabrizio's favorite dog and they throw him a servant throws him out of the window and the last lines virtually the last lines of the book during the flight down from the window its form recomposed itself for an instant in the air there seemed to be dancing a quadruped with long whiskers its right foreleg raised an imprecation then all found peace in a heap of livid dust and it's this really strange image i think so the culture editor of the new statesman tanjil rashid yeah friend of the show friend of the show who wrote about our show when it came out he wrote an essay about the leopard last year i think it was and he said in a way this image is a kind of repudiation of conservatism so the stuffed dog he said is tradition pathetically pointlessly embalmed unworthy of holding on to yeah holding on to the past yeah but i also think maybe you could say that bit of the dog in flight out of the window that's like us in our life we're thrown up into the air and we seem to be dancing as the dog is we seem to be moving and then we just land on the ground in a heap of dust and that's our lives tapia i don't want to depressive but that's your life i don't know though i don't know i think i think it's slightly it could be interpreters slightly more hopeful than that you know it could be that it's it's almost like for a moment he comes back to life and he has the yeah the vibrance and the movement of life and in that moment it matters and it matters to live for a moment even if you do end up in the dust and the other thing that i think is actually although it's very sad slightly counters the the kind of absence of idealism in the book which is the fact that we learn concetta learns at the very end that, you know, that Tancredi actually did love her and he wanted to kiss her, but her emotional hesitation repelled him.

1:16:27And so he went after the much more vibrant Angelica.

1:16:31Dominic Sandbrook: But do you know what, Tabby? But then that's undercut straight away because Angelica is in the coach going back or something, isn't she? With the bloke who told the story and she says Tancredi never liked her at all. But you would say that of your love rival, I think. I suppose you would. Well, yeah, you read into it what you want. I'm surprised your side of Muconcetta in this. I know what's happening guilt I think yeah we're going to give our verdicts now there's so much to talk about with the leopard it's such a wonderful book I really really recommend it to the listeners we I wanted to mark this because I we've done dead dogs I was going to suggest stuffed dogs but tabby being tabby the dogs have had a hard enough time from us as it is I would like to rate it out of sexy eye patches out of 10 sexy eye patches out of 10 okay so I'll go first it's limiting it to call it a great historical novel or the greatest historical novel I think it's much better than that.

1:17:19Dominic Sandbrook: I think it is a great 20th century novel about memory, about nostalgia, about disappointed hopes, and about how you make sense of your life as it moves towards its end. And I think it's great on history and all of that kind of thing, but that's not what I took from it this time. Actually, what I took was the portrait of this very thoughtful, reflective man who's wasted his life and who's looking at his life and the lives of others with this kind of very skeptical, cynical eye. And I think it's beautifully done. And I think it's a beautiful literary artifact of this book. I'm deducting your point because I wandered on rereading.

1:17:57Because he's hard on Angelica.

1:17:58Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, because he's hard on Angelica, exactly. Because I wandered on rereading whether the cynicism and the skepticism was a bit overwhelming. And whether, you know, some of his friends said of Lampedusa that he could be a massive misanthrope. And he has a very dark view of human nature. And sometimes possibly too dark. so I'm gonna give it nine out of ten but it's a brilliant book and everyone should read it what about you Tabby um I'm gonna give it a 10 out of 10 um I just I love the prose I just think you know as I was reading it I kept highlighting and highlighting it ended up being kind of whole pages because it was so perfect you know it is a piece of art it genuinely is it conveys so much kind of deep melancholy like ironic humor the cynicism and it kind of does the creep of death which should be such a depressing thing and it is a depressing thing but it does it in these slightly rosy hues which means it kind of tricks you and then at the last moment you realize what it's all been about it works on so many levels you know it has such incredible emotional complexity decline contemplation an element of human melodrama cynicism there is the prince himself you know it's a pleasure to exist in his mind and his his his thoughts are never one thing he's never one thing and the loneliness of being the one that that sees and yet doesn't hate despite being the one that sees is a great thing um and it manages to turn decline into beauty whilst also laying bare the putrid kind of vileness of it at the same time um and i don't even and i'm not going to take off that mark for cynicism because I think I mean obviously I'm a mesanthrope but also because it's colored with dark humor and there is beauty and and value amidst all the darkness I would say and it has just such grace to it and elegance it does indeed actually one thing we haven't mentioned obviously we're reading it in translation the translator was Archibald Colquhoun and I think he did it I mean I was about to say I think he did a brilliant job as though I know as though I can read Italian I can't famous master of tongues anyway the English language version is absolutely brilliant yeah but yeah if you want deep dives into things like this the translation translator you know even more exciting things all you have to do is get your hands on our brand new newsletter oh very well done tabby that's a nice link thanks yeah and this will have you know stories behind the story bits that we may have missed out um you can read a feedback yeah yeah bit of feedback you can you can discuss with other people what you thought about it you can give it your own number of sexy eye patches out of 10 it's all very exciting you know what it's a vibrant community of book lovers you can get this newsletter with more of this amusing banter at thebookclubhq.com and it's completely free and it has loads of you know fantastic stuff so do do it now tell me what have we got to come we've got a great variety of things to come many of them inspired by listeners actually exactly inspired by your requests so So first of all, because the new Odyssey movie is coming out, we have got an Odyssey special and we're doing Circe by Madeline Miller, which digs into one part of his journey home.

1:21:05Then we have The 39 Steps by John Buchan, My Brilliant Friend by Eleanor Ferrante, so we're back in Italy, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. So many people requested that one. And Lord of the Flies by William Goulding.

1:21:24Dominic Sandbrook: So loads of fun things to come. All right, I am off to the ball. Tabby is off to contemplate her own inevitable decay and mortality. And on that bombshell, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye.

1:21:55Dominic Sandbrook: The Unbreaking Trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Why am I losing? Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming only on Disney+. Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 cheap charity. A carnival cruise vacation. Gift cards from DoorDash and Best Buy. He'll then play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag. No purchase necessary. 50 U.S. and D.C. age 18 plus. See play at mcd.com for rules and play at mcd.com slash AMOE for info and playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd.

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