Lampedusa has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive.
The Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) achieved posthumous fame for his only novel, The Leopard, published a year after his death. It became the top-selling novel in Italian history and was later made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster.
Translated by Archibald Colquhoun
Lampedusa’s brief but brilliant writing career lasted a mere two years before he succumbed to lung cancer. In that time he produced one novel (The Leopard), three stories, and the beginning of a memoir, Places of My Infancy — a “tour” of Lampedusa’s family estates in Sicily at the turn of the twentieth century. “For childhood me was a lost paradise,” writes Lampedusa. “I was king of the home.” Lampedusa gives lush, intimate descriptions of the estates in town and country: one mansion with one hundred rooms, its garden with fountains full of eels, its church, its theater where wandering “country” troupes would perform, its maids and groundskeepers, and Lampedusa’s own family members. Each detail — from his mother’s silver comb to his father’s camera (owned “in 1900!”) — unlocks a vivid memory.
Lampedusa has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive.
