I can't exactly remember where I heard of this book. I think it was in something I read by Francis Fukuyama. But whatever I read, it referenced The Leopard's refrain, that "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change." The line is spoken by the young and liberal aristocrat Tancredi in the midst of Risorgimento, the Italian unification. The book deals with this issue, of how the aristocrats dealt with the changing world of the mid to late 19th century, but it has application to all times of great change. The book is especially interesting because the author, writing in the 1950s, was the descendant of the individual characters of the book. Tomasi di Lampedusa was the last of his line of minor Sicilian princes, which ended when Italy abolished titles in 1946. He never published during his lifetime, authoring this one book, which was published posthumously. The book is significant for its depiction of Sicily and for its deep themes of decay and change. It has a nostalgic feel to it, although not necessarily Conservative.
And politics pass the aristocrats of the story by, more like a force of nature than a force of man. The comparison becomes explicit: "The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off it for a week by his subjects' barricades, and now reigning once again, choleric but under constitutional restraint." We never get a direct action by any of the characters on the politics of the world. Instead, the world constantly acts on them, remaining passive.
Sicily itself also features as a character in the book. Tomasi di Lampedusa describes summers of obliterating heat, glassy seas pounded by the sun, and people baking in their clothes. Little towns disappear into folds in the land, and the whole earth is the yellowed color of dead grass, with trees few and far between. And there is a slowness, very stereotypical of southern Italy, and really pretty offensive.
"In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogenous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We're as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we've been a colony. I don't say that in complaint; it's all our fault."
There is always a feeling of some impending doom in The Leopard. It feels like an inevitable wave is washing over Sicilian aristocracy, ending their way of life. It is symbolized in the life and death of the strong, muscular Fabrizio, who is a massive man in 1860, but a shell of his former self in 1880. And there are lines like this one, that Fabrizio the Prince directs towards the priest, Father Pirrone:
"We're not blind, my dear Father, we're just human. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water. Holy Church has been granted an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like an eternity to us. We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond what we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations. I cannot worry myself about what will happen to any possible descendants in the year 1960. The Church, yes, she must worry for she is not destined to die..." [emphasis is mine]
And here's another good example:
The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943. [emphasis is mine]
A big "ending" in the book comes in the final chapter, set 30 years after the Prince Fabrizio's 1880 death in 1910. In it, Fabrizio's daughters discover that the relics they believed to be genuine in their family chapel are mostly fake, and, in the words of a priest "have no value whatsoever." I think this is meant to imply that the traditions that aristocrats maintained had lost all value, if not in truth, at least in the perception of the world. The aristocrats themselves lost any societal value. And the book ends with one of Fabrizio's daughters ordering her maid to toss the taxidermized corps of his dog, Bendico, out the window. It briefly resembles the leopard on their coat of arms before landing in a trash heap.
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