The Leopard: A Sicilian Saga

Abstract

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's 'Il gattopardo', in English 'The Leopard', a title presumably chosen by the novel's translator Archibald Colquhoun but which mistranslates the original meaning of "cheetah" or "mountain cat", is one of the most popular novels to have come out of the 20th century. Written at the end of the author's life and not published until after his death in 1957, it became an immediate success, a success also largely due to the Visconti film version of it that was produced some years later, 1963. This novel, that tells the story of the decline of an aristocratic household during the period of the unification of Italy and focuses also on the lonely figure of a Sicilian prince brought pleasure to an immense readership though some discerning and sometime diffident readers were initially puzzled about what it is really about. For Italians in particular it begged serious questions by what it said about the Unification of Italy and the contemporary Italian state. The populace in general loved the book, the pro-communist intelligentsia of the time hated it. Not for nothing it caused the word "gattopardismo" to come into the Italian language to mean political expediency and defeatism, though this is not necessarily the principal way of thinking that lies at the base of the book. Some critics disliked the novel, saying that it was old fashioned, others, more discerning, praised it for its complexity. Perhaps it is precisely because of this complexity that 'Il gattopardo' reached the success it did and even today is considered one of the great literary achievements of the last century.