The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (Paperback)

At age 47 Giuseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa (1896-1957), still slept in the bedrom where he had been born. The abnormally taciturn recluse, who mined the history of his Sicilian aristocratic family in its ruinous decline for his classic novel The Leopard , had a "vexatious, disappointing and often pathetic life." His arrogant, sharp-tongued father, fueled by a ridiculous sense of pride, spent much of his life quarreling with relatives over money. Lampedusa's domineering mother nearly wrecked her son's marriage to psychoanalyst Beatrice Mastrogiovanni, a largely epistolary relationship for years at a stretch. In this elegant, sprightly biography, Gilmour ( Lebanon: The Fractured Country ) draws an incisive portrait of a curious modernist outsider deeply skeptical of all human motives. Lampedusa's fictional counterpart, Don Fabrizio, The Leopard 's protagonist, likewise seems a contemporary figure swinging from hedonistic pursuits to the contemplation of eternity without a personal God. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Lampedusa's great novel The Leopard ( LJ 6/1/60) was accepted and published to international acclaim only after its author's death. Lampedusa had led a largely uneventful existence as a minor member of the Italian aristocracy, and his life reads at times like one long preparation for his novel, which in many senses it was. Besides establishing the sometimes meager biographical record, Gilmour analyzes The Leopard in historical and aesthetic context and examines the surprising controversy its publication generated in Italian literary circles. This book, the only one in English on Lampedusa, is recommended for collections of modern continental literature.
-Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The first official biography of Giuseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa and author of The Leopard, recounted by British journalist (and family friend) Gilmour with an elegance and precision worthy of his subject. When The Leopard was published in 1958 to great acclaim, Lampedusa was already one year dead and entirely unknown as a writer. Intensely shy and self-contained, he did not even begin writing until late in life and left the world no picture of himself save that contained in his portrait of Don Fabrizio, the doomed aristocrat of his novel, whose declining fortunes mirrored that of the Lampedusa family. The last scion of a long line of Sicilian nobility, Lampedusa grew up in a world that had little use--and no role--for him, and he found his only refuge from the tedium of daily life in literature: A voracious reader, he was capable of working his way through entire novels at a single sitting. Ill at ease among intellectuals, Lampedusa made little use of his literary interests until--well into middle age--he began to give informal lectures on English poetry and prose to a small circle of friends. Gradually he formed the notion of writing a novel that would ``preserve'' the nearly vanished world of Sicily's ancien r‚gime, much as the works of Dickens had captured 19th-century London. With marvelous insight and clarity (aided by an unimpeded access to Lampedusa's notes and papers), Gilmour traces the process by which the aging prince came to an understanding of his own history and managed to transform what he himself saw as ``a largely wasted life'' into one of the most controversial and admired novels of the century. A fascinating chronicle: Gilmour writes with the assurance of a seasoned scholar and the ease of a born storyteller. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

David Gilmour's biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of "The Leopard", one of the great novels of the twentieth century. A book whose imagery, once tasted, haunts the reader forever. "The Leopard" describes the golden era of the nineteenth-century Sicily in all its sensual, fading, aristocratic glory. But beneath the surface lurk Sicily's millenial contagions - corruption, brutality and inequality. Who wrote this masterpiece, this work of art? the answer is as unlikely as one might hope. This is a fascinating meditation on what it is that makes a writer.

The year after his death in 1957, Gossip di Lampedusa's novel The leopard was published to great acclaim. It is now recognized as one of the finest works of twentieth century fiction.For a quarter of a century, Italian and foreign scholars were denied access to the reclusive writer's paper until,following a meeting with Lampedusa's adopted son, David Gilmour succeeded in gaining permission to work in the writer's last home in Sicily.There, and in the nearby ruin of the Palazzo Lampedusa,he found many letters,diaries,notebooks, and photographs which had not seen the light of day since Lampedusa's death. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.