The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa - Softcover

BRAND NEW (NOT used) FIRST EDITION First Printing softcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; WE SHIP FAST. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201512394 This biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa is a fine book in its own right, but its greater merit is the way it illuminates both the novel and the movie that remain as the legacy of di Lampedusa's career. Aside, perhaps, for his friends and neighbors, we wouldn't remember him at all were it not as the author of "The Leopard," not published until after his death, but in time to emerge as perhaps the best-known Italian novel of the 20th Century. Most people, whether or not they have ever heard of the novel, will recognize it (if at all) in the form of Burt Lancaster, swooping around the ballroom floor in Visconti's great movie. It's wonderful fun but it is doubly misleading. Lancaster persists in our mind as the picture of what we want an aristocrat to be: lean and strapping, dignified and austere. A careful reading of the novel will remind us that this was never quite what di Lampedusa had in mind: his own fictional account of his princely great-grandfather is far more nuanced and ironic. Yet even in the novel, something of the hero remains. Turn now to the first page of the photo insert after page 114: here we see the prince himself, Giulio Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa. And what an unsettling revalation emerges. He is sturdy (fat?) and he projects an air of dignity. Or tries to: but on anything more than a glance, we see that he is shy, tentative, and perhaps half bewildered at his own position. And the muttonchop sideburns: perhaps they made sense in his time, but for the contemporary observer, they can't be anything more than absurd. Tactfully but inescapably, Gilmour in his text acknowledges the truth of the portrait. We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)