KINGDOM OF ITALY AUTHOR · HISTORY · CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION
Also known as: Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi Lampedusa
The daily recital of the Rosary was over.
— from Leopard, 1960
Leopard
1960
"The leopard is the ultimate cat. It makes the lion and the tiger appear overblown and all other members of the cat family look puny. Whereas lions hunt in the open and then share their kill, the leopard is solitary, stealthy and selfish. This cat ambushes its prey and then carries it high into a tree, where it can dine alone. The leopard has commanded respect and awe in mankind for centuries. Considered the 'perfect predator', capable of frustrating the most dedicated big game hunter, leopards are vicious, agile and deadly animals who will even attack humans when cornered or challenged. In Leopard Desmond Morris shows all sides of the animal's character: its athletic elegance, its predatory skill, its wary shyness, its cunning intelligence, its parental devotion, its preference for solitary living and even its capacity to seek revenge. Morris traces the evolution of leopards, their roles as pets and in circuses, their conservation and current habitat threats. He also describes their rich symbolism, and looks at the leopard print in fashion, both haute couture and high street, as well as the leopard in art, literature, film and popular culture."--Page 4 of cover.
The siren and selected writings
Although best known as author of a singular masterpiece, The Leopard, the Prince of Lampedusa left a rich and varied oeuvre that repays a careful reading. The best and most representative of it is collected in this volume. Places of My Infancy, a childhood memory of the Lampedusa palace in Palermo at the turn of the century, and of the great family mansion inland at Santa Margherita, provides a fascinating background to the princely setting of The Leopard. The text hitherto published had been edited and pruned by the author's widow, and resulted in a somewhat impoverished version. Here the author's original text - with many characters and incidents earlier suppressed - has been fully restored. The story of The Professor and the Siren, a delicious example of Lampedusa's fantasy, and The Blind Kittens (the first chapter of an unfinished novel of bourgeois Sicily that would have formed a pendant to The Leopard) both featured as appendices to Harvill's earlier edition of the great novel. They are included here together with a charming, comic, bitter-sweet story, Joy and the Law. Giuseppe di Lampedusa's knowledge of English literature, which derived from a lifetime's reading as well as from a number of extended visits to Britain as a young man, bore fruit in a series of informal seminars he gave in his later years at Palermo. The plan was to introduce his listeners to English writers from Bede to Aldous Huxley, pausing along the way not only at the great classics but also among the lesser known Restoration poets and Victorian novelists. To this, as also in his shrewd and dynamic appraisal of the French novelist Stendhal, he brought the lucid intellect and warmth of feeling that informs his own deeply Sicilian creative genius.