I’ve been reading Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa’s only published novel, The Leopard, written in Italian in the mid-1950s but only published in English in 1960, about three years after his death. I’m enjoying it. It isn’t difficult to read. But I don’t really want to criticize it analytically, or discuss the text in more than a superficial way, because I’m only half-way through it, and because I’ve been overtaken and slightly surprised by another notion during my short time with this small book.
I can remember that my mother read it as soon as it became available. And she must have enjoyed it because it reappeared in the house once or twice. The first time, she would have been anticipating its availability at the little public library in Malmesbury High Street after hearing it reviewed in the BBC Home Services programme, The Critics. And I suppose she might have read about it in the Sunday Times as well. Malmesbury’s tiny library was her lifeline and they supplied so many books that she couldn’t afford and which were her refuge; so many children and so little money having left her exhausted and uncertain about so much in life. But she always seemed to have clear ideas about art and literature, and she accumulated a vast experience of reading.
As a child, I completely failed to understand or sympathize with her way of seeing and dealing with the world. But whilst I’ve been reading this book, her dust has suddenly been re-assembled and her spirit re-kindled, before my very eyes so to speak. Suddenly I discover the very sentences and images that must have amused and excited her and so, even whilst I am reading, sometimes it feels as if I were in the old living room where she rested between laundering marathons, and I can see her laughing from the corner of my mind’s eye. What’s more, I can sometimes hear what might be her own “internal voice” reading the words to me whilst I stare at the pages, as if I were in her head and reading through her eyes. This novelist’s powers of evocation are often startling and heart-warming, his dry wit creeps up on me. But who might have guessed that fifty years later he would indirectly evoke her for me ? Not I.
