Elio Vitorini, a Sicilian like Don Fabrizio, rejected the manuscript of The Leopard believing that it would be good for humanity, although he may not even have read it in its entirety. That advantage is ours.
His refusal ranks among the greatest fiascos in the history of publishing: he claimed that the novel was too static, as if from another era, and that it was based on stereotypes that denied the progress of history. Ah, history, Lampedusa laughs (sadly) at it. The criticism following publication did its part in the cruelty: “a decadent, right-wing novel.”
The interesting thing about all this is how to place it in time (it was published in 1958), breathing with iron lungs alongside its contemporaries, considered greater, more groundbreaking, and more innovative in the most splendid and terrible century.
Not considering himself a writer, they say, Lampedusa works with the scalpel of a master, masterfully handling narrative time, ellipsis, episodic or fragmentary narration, and above all placing us in the dim light that envelops these ghostly characters awaiting death.
The art of lamentation is called elegy, says Juan Forn. In The Leopard there is no lament; to reduce it to that would be to read it too badly, but it does have something elegiac about it, not so much for a lost world as for a style, a way of writing, a way of reading. It is well known that Lampedusa set out to write the novel after spending a few days at a literary festival, among writers, in silence and listening, and realizing that none of them could narrate what he narrated.
The novel has continued its journey on the market with successive reissues, such as this one I have read in translation by Ricardo Pochtar. More recently, one of the most popular movie and series platforms has brought it to the screen with amendments that are very close to unacceptable. The series fails, for example, in its portrayal of the Prince, who lacks the melancholic depth and disenchanted, skeptical, and at times alienated, almost adrift gaze that makes the novel so unique.
It was not Italian fiction, which came to us from the confines of Dante and Boccaccio, that would lead the European avant-garde in the Joycean era. That is not in dispute. But one always wants to return to it, as if we felt a certain predilection or as a reader returning (like Tancredi, the Prince’s nephew) to a familiar landscape that is difficult to leave behind. The reason is now clear.
