22. The Leopard: The Greatest Historical Novel Ever Written?

How did Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s family story shape his only novel, The Leopard? Why is The Leopard considered an Italian masterpiece? And, who is the sexiest man ever written? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of The Leopard, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  The door opened.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  Uncle, you're looking wonderful this evening. Black suits you perfectly. But what are you looking at? Are you paying court to death?

• 2:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tanqueray was arm in arm with Angelica. Both of them were still under the sensual influence of the dance and were tired. For both of them, death was purely an intellectual concept, a facet of knowledge as it were, and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was inner ignorance of this supreme consolation which makes the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old, the latter a nearer the safety exit.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Prince, said Angelica. We'd heard you were here. We came to have a little rest but also to ask you something. I hope you won't refuse it.

• 3:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Her eyes were full of sly laughter. Her hand was resting on Don Fabrizio's sleeve.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  I wanted to ask you to dance the next Mazurka with me. Do say yes now, don't be naughty. We all know you used to be a great dancer.

• 3:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  The prince was very pleased and felt suddenly quite spry, the capuchin's crypt indeed, his hairy cheeks quivered with pleasure. The idea of the Mazurka rather alarmed him though, that military dance or heel banging in turns was not for his joints. To kneel before Angelica would be a pleasure, but what if he found it difficult to get up afterwards? Thank you, my dear girl. You're making me feel young again. I'll be happy to obey you, but not the Mazzurka. Grant me the first waltz.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  So hello, everybody. That is a memorable moment from Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampezzuza's book, The Leopard, or Il Gattapardo in the original Italian, and it was first published in Milan in 1958. And it's often described as the greatest historical novel ever written. It's set in Sicily during the Wars of Italian Unification, and it begins in May 1860 with Garibaldi's red shirts, or the red-shirted volunteers, landing in Sicily to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy. And then the book ends with a unified Italy under the House of Savoy. So it's a book about lots of things. It's about historical change and continuity, but

• 4:58Speaker 04

  there's much more than that. So much of it is what's going on beneath the surface. It's very sensuous. It's a sensuous portrait of Sicily. So it's about the smells, the sounds, the way it feels. But it's also about a man, the declining years of a single aristocrat, and this is Don Fabrizio, the man in whose head we are in that opening reading. And he is the prince of Salina. And his world is changing drastically, and he can feel it slowly slipping away. And he has a tragic sense of what will come. So Dominic, you must have read this book before. In fact, I know you have, because I'm pretty sure you've mentioned it on The Rest is History before.

• 5:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  I have, yes, when we were talking about great historical novels. So hi, everybody. I read it years ago. I absolutely loved the film adaptation, which was made in 1963 by Lucchino Visconti, who was himself an aristocrat, actually. And it's got Bert Lancaster, he plays the prince, and Alan Delon, who plays Tancredi, and my favorite actress of all time, Tabi, Claudia Cardinale.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  You're a big fan of her artistry.

• 6:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Artistry is exactly the word. She plays Angelica. So you've got these three characters in that scene that we did. And Angelica is the product of the rising liberal middle classes. And these are the people who are likely to Inherit the reins of the new Italy, but they also pose a deadly threat to the prince's kind of feudal world. And I thought when I first read it, so that's about 20 years ago, that it was an absolutely brilliant book. As a portrait of character, as a portrait of a particular point in time. But also what I liked when I first read it was that it's a meditation on political change or the lack of political change. I saw other things in it this time, actually, partly because we're reading in the context of reading so many other wonderful books.

• 6:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I saw sort of similarities to perhaps some quite surprising books that we've done before. Not, I have to say, a court of thorns and roses, Tabby.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  It's the obvious comparison.

• 6:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  But, I mean, you said it's a historical novel. It's not just a historical novel, I think. So E M Forster, when he first reviewed it, said, it's not a historical novel. It's just a novel that happens to take place in history. I think that's a good way of thinking about it. I think if you've got no interest whatsoever in 19th century Italian politics, you can still find this a really beautiful and moving piece of art and a sort of subtle reflection on human nature. What about you, Tabby? What did you make of it when you first read it?

• 7:22Speaker 04

  I think that that's a really, really good point because when I first read it, I definitely didn't read it as a historical novel. I was about 13. I knew nothing about the historical context. It doesn't read like a typical historical saga. So much of it is about kind of the feel, it's about mood and melancholy and continuity or, you know, the break in a cycle. And so that's, it read very much to me as sad nostalgia, the sense of something slipping away.

• 7:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  But because I was young, because I was 13, I could see, I could see that it was a thing of beauty from the language, which is so elegant and so finely kind of wrought. I didn't remember it very well because I don't think there's actually, that not a lot happens. It's kind of a stream of events that run into each other. So I couldn't remember much of it. And I was always quite interested in the story behind it, in Lampedusa himself, because it's kind of legendary now, how the book came to be published.

• 8:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  And he's a very interesting man.

• 8:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a very interesting man. So actually, before we talk about the book itself, let's talk about Lampedusa because this bloke and how he came to write this book, it is a pretty remarkable story. So his name, you'll see it on the book, is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The slightly confusing thing is that the surname actually is Tomasi.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because that's the family, but he is the prince of Lampedusa, which is this island, kind of basically in the middle of nowhere, closer to Africa than to Italy. And to give you a bit of background, to give people a bit of background, because this is the story of an aristocratic prince by, you know, it's the story of a prince by a prince. So Giuseppe Tomasi himself was born in 1896 in Palermo and his family traced their lineage back for centuries. They'd been elevated to the aristocracy in the 16th century and then made princes of Lampedusa in 1667. And the emblem was a leopard, a leopard rampant. In The Leopard, Fabrizio, or the narrator says of Fabrizio's family, that they're basically always been incapable of adding up their expenditure and subtracting their own debts.

• 9:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is a portrait of the Tomasi family. They are useless historically in managing their money. And they're just a sort of, they were basically idle wasters for most of history.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  It's kind of a tale as old as time, often about, you know, people's perception of the aristocracy.

• 9:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly, it is, exactly. And of them, only one of them is really notable. And this is the eighth prince, Prince Giulio. He was the leopard author's great grandfather. And he is in some ways the model for Fabrizio, the protagonist of the book. So he loved astronomy. He collected scientific books. He went on trips to see eclipses. Fabrizio is a very alpha character.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  In reality, Prince Giulio was not an alpha character at all. So there's a little bit of, well, we talk about how there's a bit of wish fulfillment in Lampedusa's portrait of him.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  He said, though, in a letter to a friend, Lampedusa, that he wrote that he had intentionally kind of exaggerated his impressiveness.

• 10:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, I think so. I think so. Anyway, Prince Giulio died in 1885 and he didn't, he either didn't leave a will or his wife destroyed the will because she wanted every order children to share, including her daughters, to share the estate equally. And basically, the result of this was that the Lampedusa estate had to be divided between nine different children.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  Disaster.

• 10:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it ended up in court effectively for the next 60 years. It was in what was called judicial administration. So it's a bit like the estates, the John Dyson, John Dyson case in Bleak House.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Totally is. A never ending case where no one ever ends up benefiting because there are so many claimants.

• 10:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  So there's all these different claimants who are allowed to live in the houses that belong to the Lampedusa family, but they're not allowed to make any money from the estates under the-

• 11:02Speaker 04

  An embittered commune.

• 11:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. This is exactly what happens. So this, I think this obviously lies behind a big theme of the book, we'll talk about this after the break, is the sense of inevitable decline and decay that hangs over the whole thing. This doomed world. I mean, as he's, as he's dying, Fabrizio thinks about all the beauties of their estate, the tapestries at Dona Fugata, the almond groves at the Ragattisti, the fountain of Afflutiti, that these will all be lost forever. And this is obviously what happened to the author's own family.

• 11:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  However, as David Gilmour says in his brilliant biography of Tomasi de Lampe di Uso, he says, you know, it's a very familiar story in Sicily, but what made the Lampe di Uso house different was that at the end of the line, there was one person who remembered and understood the traditions of his family and who was able at the last moment to transform them into literature. And this is Giuseppe.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is Giuseppe and he grew up in the Lampe di Uso Palace in the centre of Palermo in the early 1900s. And, you know, it's a crumbling, slightly wretched place. And he lives there with his parents, sort of a father who's been, who's sort of disaffected, dissatisfied with everything that's happened because of this ongoing legal battle, uncles and domestic servants. His father was haughty and arrogant. It's kind of your typical aristocrat, obsessed with horses and feuding, essentially.

• 12:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  But his biggest influence was his mother, Beatrice, because his mother, so she was also from a Sicilian aristocratic family, but she was a great reader and she owned this tremendous library, had a huge fiction collection from the 17th and 18th centuries. And she, I mean, it's, it's another old story. She totally dominated her son even after his marriage. And I think it probably had a really bad effect on his marriage.

• 12:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  It did, yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  I mean, unsurprisingly, I think. And then in Sicily, there were always rumours that it was actually her and not him that wrote The Leopard. And he found this old manuscript and edited it and then, you know.

• 13:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, which is not true. He definitely.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  Which is not true, which is not true. So he grows up in this odd environment and he's a very taciturn boy. He has few friends. He's definitely not one for kind of games and japes. He always strikes me as fairly humorless, but then that can't be right because there is a real dark humor, I think, underlying the leopard.

• 13:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  He calls himself a boy who loved solitude, who liked the company of things more than of people. And you can see this right to the end of his life and he divides his time between the crumbling Palermo Palace and then the family country estate. And this is at Santa Margherita in southwest Palermo. And this is the model for the home in Sicily that Fabrizio loves, and that's Donna Figata. And it's his country estate in the book.

• 13:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  He only goes to school when he's 14, but by then he speaks Italian, French, German. And he wants to read literature at university, but his father thinks that it's not a good idea and he should become a diplomat instead. And it's unclear really whether he ever did go to university. He enrolls in Genoa, probably did some classes in Rome, but then of course the First World War breaks out. And he's called up and he serves against the Austrians, but then he's captured in 1917.

• 14:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is incredible story, isn't it? Him and the Austrians.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  It is an incredible story. And, and also that when you read about the kind of man that he was, this seems quite incongruous.

• 14:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  All these things that happened to him. So he's sent to a prisoner of war camp in Hungary. And then amazingly, it's just so bizarre, on the way, the Austrians allow him, his, his captors allow him to go on a tour of Vienna and he claims later that it's because his German A was so brilliant that they were like,

• 14:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  you know, bravo, do what you will, but also because they discovered the ducal coronet sewn into his shirts.

• 14:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a great story. I mean,

• 14:47Speaker 04

  It's a great story.

• 14:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, the Austrians do behave in quite a, um, quite a bizarre way in the First World.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, these are people that love feathered hats. They're gonna love a ducal coronet. They'll forgive anything. But then even better, he actually manages to bribe the camp guards to give him an Austrian uniform and he manages to escape and gets a train to the Swiss border. Inevitably, he's recaptured. There's always something quite comical about people, sort of escaping and then being recaptured, sort of in the First World War. Um, but he's well treated. His only punishment, it's very severe. I don't know, I don't know how he recovered from this. His only punishment is to reimburse the Austrians for his train fare.

• 15:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's so Central European, isn't it?

• 15:28Speaker 04

  It really, it really is. And have some cake with it. And then he's taken back to the camp and escapes again at the end of the war. So it's very Colditz.

• 15:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it is.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Behavior.

• 15:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Colditz, but more, but sort of funner.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  More, yeah, funner and more aristocratic.

• 15:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  And then after the war, though, you know, this all sounds sort of jolly fun, but after the war, he does sink into, you know, lassitude. He has stress. He complains about insomnia and nightmares.

• 15:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Insomnia and nightmares. I think those two things kind of happen simultaneously.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  No, I don't think so, because nightmares happen when you're asleep.

• 16:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  They do indeed, yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Think about it.

• 16:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, yeah, he gets back home, he's coming, he can't sleep, and yet simultaneously having nightmares, which is peculiar.

• 16:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's the 1920s. It's very turbulent in Italy. It's what's called the the red years. So lots of strikes, labour unrest in the countryside. It's the rise of the black shirts, then the advent of Mussolini and fascism.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's so ironic, that following on the heels of this great liberal movement.

• 16:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, there'd been this sort of great enthusiasm for liberalism beforehand, which we'll talk about in the book because he's very critical about liberalism. And actually, one of the reasons, well, he's critical about liberal democracy and whether it can ever work in Italy. He thinks it's brilliant in in Britain. He loves Britain and he loves like British politics. He loves British literature. But he says, oh, it will never work in Italy. We can't, you know, liberal democracy can't really take root. And what that means is that it's all a sham and a pretense. And what that means is that in the 1920s, he's actually kind of fine with the advent of fascism. He sees it as a regrettable necessity.

• 17:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's never particularly critical of Mussolini. He doesn't like the uniforms. He doesn't like the parades. He doesn't like the violence and the demagoguery.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  I'd have thought he'd find him distasteful.

• 17:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think he finds Mussolini distasteful, but he's not a sort of out and out critic by any means. And actually, in this period, he's quite, he's just quite detached. You know, he's an aristocrat in Palermo who is lonely. He's quite misanthropic. He, he's not very sociable. He's not a good mixer. He's aloof. He's quite disdainful of other people. So here he is, this guy, just sort of drifting along in his own little bubble, basically.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so, I mean, as is so often the case, he spends much of his time reading. His family call him Il Mostro, so the monster, because he's so ridiculously well-read. And in history and literature, and often in original languages, which is remarkable.

• 18:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  And he loves, as you said, he has a special fondness for English literature, which is excellent to hear. He's read Tristan and Shandy three times and he adores Shakespeare. And it's such a, I don't know, it's such a charming thought that when, his comfort blanket, in a sense, you know, for many of us, that's sort of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. His comfort blanket is Shakespeare, but his favourite book of all is The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. So like Tolstoy and Louisa May Alcott, who also were big fans.

• 18:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  What is it with The Pickwick Papers? I don't even think it's that good.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  I don't either. It does absolutely nothing for me. I don't know, maybe it's a time and place thing.

• 18:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, must be.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  You know, humour's changed, yeah. He keeps a copy of it on his bedside table and then he always takes it with him on his travels. So, and he's constantly rereading it. So it's quite a sort of, it's kind of a nostalgic thing. I think that's lovely. And then between 1922 and 1927, his uncle is Italian ambassador in London, so he visits several times. And he goes on these wonderful literary pilgrimages. So for example, he visits the Brontë's house. But he loves, he's captivated, he obviously has, you know, quite a romantic spirit underneath it. He loves the moors. He said, they're immense, more boundless and bare.

• 19:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  And then it's in London that he meets a very implausible figure indeed.

• 19:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, his future wife. So basically, he doesn't, up to this point, he hasn't been trying to catch, because he's just sort of, he's quite a sort of, he's a solitary, awkward figure who just walks around with a massive copy of Shakespeare all the time.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  And so cynical, it sounds like me. And so cynical as well, I suppose.

• 19:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Incredibly cynical.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, again, something he has in common with you. And in 1925, at his uncle's house in London, he met this woman called Alessandra Rolf, who everybody called her Lisi. And she is the daughter of an exiled Baltic German baron. Well, actually, her father is dead, but she's in exile after the Russian Revolution. She speaks loads of languages. She's really into psychoanalysis. That's her great passion. She had married this Estonian baron, but he turned out to be gay. And then she becomes, she's divorced from him. She and Giuseppe Tomasi become great pals and then they sort of strike up this romantic relationship, although it's a romance founded really on intellectual connection rather than, I think, a physical one. So what they will do is they will spend evenings together just

• 20:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  reading passages from their favourite authors.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  It's very erotic.

• 20:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I think that's, you don't think that's quite sweet?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  I do think that's nice. I think that's lovely, I have to say.

• 20:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  So in 1932, they get married and this does not really work out well because Giuseppe's mother is still on the scene. She's very possessive. They are two women quarrel and Lisi basically after a year says, fine, I'm out of here. And they're still married, but she basically goes off to Latvia and she hangs around in Latvia for the rest of the 1930s. And only when Latvia is then absorbed into the Soviet Union does she come back to Sicily. Their relationship generally seems to be pretty distant. There's not a tremendous amount of affection in their letters.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  I actually read some of their letters yesterday.

• 21:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, did you?

• 21:01Speaker 04

  And they're quite sweet. They're parts sweet, but they're certainly not, you know, particularly loving. In a lot of his, he's constantly asking her to get The Leopard published.

• 21:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Can you basically do a load of errands for me? I think that's, I think that's effectively the fate of any marriage.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Oh, but then sometimes he'll, sometimes he'll go, um, go to the doctor, love.

• 21:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  If you've got a letter from your spouse just saying, go to the doctor, you'd be like, come on.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  Trot down to the therapist.

• 21:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, in The Leopard, Fabrizio muses about marriage and he describes it as flames for a year, ashes for 30. So Tabby, that's a warning to you.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  I know. That's the fear, isn't it? Geez. So then in 1934, his father dies and he becomes the prince of Lampedusa. And he now decides to spend most of his time in Palermo, first in the palace, but then it's bombed in the Second World War, which is also so telling because there's a moment in the book when they're describing the beautiful frescoes and then they say, oh, but then it would end up being wiped out by sort of a shell made somewhere in America.

• 22:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  So that cynicism always comes through. And then he moves to a new house in Via Bittera and that is now, you tell me, an apartment hotel and you say it looks very nice.

• 22:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tragically, this is exactly the kind of way that I spend my time. So basically I fell down a massive rabbit hole, obviously looking, looking up this place. You can stay in his old house. I think it's the number one rated guest house on TripAdvisor. Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  From Lampadusa to TripAdvisor.

• 22:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  But to stay in the room where he had written The Leopard.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  No, it's true. I was actually speaking to someone the other day that went and saw all of his handwritten manuscripts around there, so.

• 22:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, wow. That's nice.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  People kind of see him in the streets of Palermo going for his morning coffee and he's described as a large bulky figure, very distinct and shabby. His eyes alert and his leather bag was overloaded with books and confectionery, which had to last him for the rest of the day.

• 22:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So cakes and stuff.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  Cakes and books.

• 22:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think he's like one of those people that you sometimes meet who's like in a hot day, wearing a massive overcoat, sweating.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  Shuffling along.

• 23:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Shuffling along, looking very shifty and melancholy and carrying a big bag stuffed with coppers of Shakespeare and cakes. That's basically his vibe.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  I think that's quite chic in a funny way. But then the English painter Derek Hill, who is a visitor, says he's a very un-Sicilian man. He's reticent, retiring and extremely erudite and intellectual. He looks a bit like T S Eliot.

• 23:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does look like T S Eliot.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  He would have liked, yeah. He loves T S Eliot and he spends his time chain smoking, drinking water. So there's that famous party spirit coming out to play and he's just constantly lost in this world of books.

• 23:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  But then he does something very shaming, Tabby.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  It's mortifying, actually.

• 23:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  At the beginning of the 1950s, he starts his own book club podcast, effectively.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  Never stood a chance after that.

• 23:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  No. So basically what he does, at the Café Matzara in Palermo, which is his favourite hangout. He basically will hold court with some of his younger friends, like, you know, sort of sons of aristocratic families about books.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  Producers.

• 24:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the producers. This is very much my vibe. And he, and Lisi, his wife, says, well, why don't you turn these into a little literature course? And you can, they can, a book group and they'll turn up every week and they'll sit around, listen to him and he'll talk about books.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  I admire this.

• 24:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's like, this is brilliant. And, and he take, he really, really gets stuck into it. He writes more than a thousand pages of notes. So that's very Tabitha Syrett.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  I know. Birds of a feather.

• 24:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  He writes all these huge, like reams and reams of notes about the whole of English literature. From the venerable Bede to Graham Greene. And he knows, he's read everything. So if you, there's some minor restoration poet that no one in England has heard of. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampegiusa has read him and knows all about him.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he gets massively deep into, like us, he goes really deep into the historical background. He loves that. So sometimes his listeners will say, can we actually talk about the book? Like, and he's like, no.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, like ours.

• 24:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  We need to do the first half of the podcast about the author's life. Tabby took us through some of his highlights because he and I have some of the same tastes.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. So he loves Shakespeare and he likes the same Shakespeare plays as you. So Henry the Fourth, the First, the Second. He said that he would sacrifice 10 years of his life for the privilege of meeting full staff for an hour, which I think is odd because full staff is quite a laugh.

• 25:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, why is that odd?

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Well, because I, I don't, I think of him as not a particular, like, you know, I can't really see him going out drinking with Prince Hal, you know?

• 25:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, that's true. So they, well, he just thinks, I think the full staff is a brilliant character, but you're right. They're not exactly soulmates.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  But then he also, he adores Dickens, loves Jane Austen. He loves Wuthering Heights, which is interesting, given, you know, the very first episode of the show. He's, he kind of buys into the, the Bronte legend. He said that Emily Bronte had descended down, deep down into the human spirit and had naturally arrived in hell. Scathing. So he's got some very good taste. He also likes modern writers who loves Conrad, like you, Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene.

• 25:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  And he sees Graham Greene as the greatest modern English writer alongside T S Eliot.

• 26:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  So he's half right.

• 26:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think Graham Greene is a good writer, actually, though he's very unfashionable now.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  Oh, I think he's very good. I don't think he's.

• 26:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's not the greatest.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  The best, no.

• 26:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, the question obviously is whether he's ever thought about writing a book himself. Because he's been doing this course in 1953, 1954. And actually 20 years earlier, he had thought about writing a book. Lisi, his wife, said he'd thought of writing a historical novel set in Sicily during the Garibaldi period. Based on the character of his great grandfather, the astronomer Giulio di Lampegiusa. And he possibly had made a start on this in the nineteen thirty s, but if he did, any notes or drafts have long since been lost. And basically, he didn't do it. He was a man who was sunk in passivity and lassitude for almost all of his life. So he's the kind of person who would say to you, yes, well, I have thought of writing a book,

• 26:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  but I've never quite got around to it and I probably never will. You know, that kind of person.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  But then at the end of nineteen fifty four, it's like something changes in him. Like someone's flicked a switch and David Gillmor, his biographer, says, it's as though he decided finally to escape from the years of disappointment and to seize, basically, the opportunity to redeem what he recognised had been a largely wasted life, which I think is quite a sad line.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  I think that is such a sad line.

• 27:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's basically in his fifties at this point and he just thinks, I've completely wasted. He's a very clever man, but he's completely wasted his time on earth. And I think there's a sense of a ticking clock because he's starting to get breathy. He's a massive smoker.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  He started to get breathing problems. He will be diagnosed shortly with emphysema. And so at the end of nineteen fifty four, he just thinks to himself, okay, it's now or never. And he starts writing this book and his plan is basically to write the Sicilian Ulysses. So he says, I'm going to set it on the day of Garibaldi landing in Sicily. Don't worry, we'll explain about Garibaldi in a little bit. Garibaldi landing in Sicily and it's going to be twenty four hours, like Ulysses is twenty four hours. But then he starts writing and he says, I need more than twenty four hours. So he widens the timeframe. And then over the next couple of years in Cafe Mazzara, his favourite hangout, or in his library at home,

• 28:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  he sits every morning with a blue biro. So, you know, anybody who thinks, oh, this is a very conservative book. This is a book surely written with a fountain pen of the highest quality.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. By an aristocrat with a high collar in a sort of beautiful palace. No.

• 28:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's actually scribbling it with blue biro in this crumbling library. And he's very slow and he spends, I mean, the first chapter alone, he rewrites and rewrites it. It takes him four months. And the reason is because he wants to avoid any cliches. He's spent all his life thinking about books. And he wants every single sentence, every word to be packed with imagery and with subtlety and with nuance.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  And meaning as well.

• 28:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, which I think it absolutely is.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  And you can see this so, so much in the first chapter. So it's the one that he spent the longest on. He wrote several drafts and it is incredibly lush. It's sensuous, you know, it's these frescoes on the palace ceiling. There's this stench of this wounded soldier who crawls into this rose garden. And there are ants crawling over his corpse and, and it's, and it's kind of decorous, but so visceral at the same time. You know, his guts are spilling out onto the soil and there's constantly the sense of something slowly wilting or dying and, and, and you almost get, you can almost smell it. Um, and these gorgeous descriptions of kind of got gilded walls and churches or once fine statues and they're all crumbling. So it's all kind of fatigue, heat and dust.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  And the description of the garden is especially powerful because it really sets the mood. So I'll read it. Scents that were cloying, fleshy and slightly putrid, like aromatic liquids distilled from the relics of certain saints. From a grove, from a grove beyond the wall came an erotic waft of early orange blossom. So there you, you can see he's melding sweet, sensuous scents with decay and death. It's very evocative.

• 30:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Whereas there's a bit where he's got these roses from Paris, description of the roses. And they have turned into, enfeebled by the strong, if languid pull of Sicilian earth, they have turned into objects like flesh colored cabbages, obscene and distilling a dense, almost indecent scent, which no French horticulturist would have dared hoped for. The prince put one under his nose and seemed to be sniffing the thigh of a dancer from the opera. So you've got the decay, you've got the, the sort of cosmopolitan-ness, you've got the beauty, but also the sensuality of the prince.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  The prince's instinct.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  There's an eroticism.

• 30:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's an, exactly an eroticism. So, so this is what he's working on. He keeps it quiet all this time for two years. He's, he doesn't mention it to his friends. But then on the eighth of March, 1956, he writes in his diary that his histoire sans nom, his history with no name, is finished. Actually, it's not finished because this is what he's done is not the version that we have today. And a friend of his comes around that day to talk about books and Lampe Dusa says, well, what do you think of this? And he gives him an exercise book and says, what do you think? And then it's like the dam has burst and he starts giving it to all his friends. Look at this. What do you think of this? I've written a book.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  That's very human. I can, I can totally see that happening.

• 31:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's delighted with himself.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  I'm quite pleased with it.

• 31:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  What do you think?

• 31:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's exactly what I would do, to be honest.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I, I never would have been silent about it in the first place.

• 31:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the question is, will he find a publisher?

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. So in May 1956, he sends it to the very prestigious Milan publisher, Mondadori. By now it has a name, so it's Il Gattopardo, so the leopard, but not in its finished form. It's really just kind of the first two and the last two chapters. So it's missing out those middle chapters. It's really interesting when you look at how he jigged and rejigged the order of them. Because the timeline is quite confusing. So the title, so Gattopardo, it doesn't actually mean leopard. It means ocelot or serval, which is an African wildcat. But he seems to have meant, so it's kind of an interesting translation question. He seems to have meant leopard because that is the emblem of the family.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  And Fabrizio, Don Fabrizio himself is a big handsome arrogant figure and he's very Leonine. So leopard suits him. So the publishers Mondadori, they don't reply till December. And then, shockingly, they turn it down. The truth is, I think, they just don't know what to make of it. It's, it is quite an unusual book.

• 32:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  The trend in Italian fiction to be, to be very, very kind of neo-realist, all about kind of the working classes. And Italian culture in the 1950s is very politicised. It's very, very, I mean, particularly on the left. People who command, the commanding heights of letters in Italy in the 1950s tend to be Marxists. And this book, they look at this like, what is this? Like this book about a prince in Sicily in 1860s?

• 32:47Speaker 04

  Is he lauding the aristocracy as well? They're wondering that.

• 32:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 32:51Speaker 04

  But they do think it has some merit. And interesting, I read his, his adopted son Gio wrote about it. And he said that they had meant to send him kind of not the standard letter, rejection letter. They'd meant to say, oh, it is good, but maybe this, but maybe that. But it just got lost in translation and there he ends up getting kind of the standard rejection. Anyway, he carries on writing, he produces the middle chapters, but in early 1957, he's been diagnosed with lung cancer. And he dies in his sleep in the early hours of the 23rd of July and he's only 60. And in his last will, he said that there were only three people in the world that he loved, and that was his wife, his adopted son and his, um, his adopted son's fiance, which is quite sad.

• 33:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  That is quite sad, but that's not quite the end of the story, is it? Because about a year later, in the spring of 1958, his widow Lisi gets a call. The publishers Feltrinelli actually decide they want to publish it. And there's a, they have a contemporary literature series and this run by a novelist called Giorgio Basani, quite a well-known novelist in Italy. He rings her up to discuss it and she says, well, actually what you've got is not all of it. He wrote more, like, I think there's a chapter about a ball.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  Which is such a glorious chapter, imagine if I hadn't been there.

• 34:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know, she says, you know, would you, would you have liked there to be a chapter about a ball? Basani says, brilliant line, a ball is always a good thing, but how could one get hold of a chapter now? And she says, well, I think he was writing one before he died. I don't know where it is. And so she searches for us and she asks around and her sister who lives in Rome says, oh, there's some typewritten thing that I did for him that's in the house in Rome somewhere.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  Unbelievable.

• 34:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, his sister digs it out, gives it to this bloke Basani. And Basani reads it and he's, you know, he's excited, oh great, he wrote about a ball. And then he's like, oh no, this is absolutely terrible.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  This is terrible.

• 34:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like this, it's like incompetently written.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Every second word is misspelt.

• 34:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. And he says to Lisi and her sister, was there a handwritten original of this typewriters? They do some more digging and basically underneath the sofa or something, they find the handwritten notes. And Basani realises that Lisi's sister had completely, she was obviously a terrible typist. And had missed out loads of words and put in no punctuation. And so the original was much better. And he says, brilliant, we can put this ball chapter. So the ball was what we, that's the scene we read at the beginning is from the ball chapter. So he puts that in the book. The book is published in Milan in the end of 1958. Now, lots of sort of avant-garde left-wing critics in Italy, sort of literary intellectuals,

• 35:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  think, oh, this is a shocking book. It's very reactionary in its style and in its content. So there's a fashionable novelist at the time called Vasco Pratolini, who wrote, "For the last 30 years, we have strained to advance our literature. Lampadusa has put us back 60 years."

• 35:43Speaker 04

  That's clearly such a ridiculous thing to say. What can he possibly mean?

• 35:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, well, help us see he's, they are, they are keen, you know, they're, they are keen to write experimental, politically engaged, you know, very 1950s kind of stuff. And what he's basically saying is, how dare somebody write a really good book that is old fashioned? But it gets good reviews in some other newspapers like La Stampa, a very prestigious paper in Italy. And then it wins the top Italian fiction award, the Strega Prize. Starts to sell loads of copies, becomes a word of mouth hit. I think particularly important is the fact, Italy is still quite deferential to Britain and France at this point culturally, especially France. And in France, it gets brilliant reviews. The top French Marxist, Louis Aragon,

• 36:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  says, "It's one of the great novels of this century, one of the greatest novels of all time." And over time, the Italian critics sort of fall into line. So for example, there was a very eminent Sicilian writer called Leonardo Sciaccia. And he had initially said, "It's a terrible book. It's very down on Sicily. I don't like it."

• 36:48Speaker 04

  It is down on Sicily.

• 36:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is down on Sicily. He's right about that. But then 20 years later, Sciaccia recanted, "Lampadusa was unfortunately right and we were wrong," he says, which is, I think, big of him.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  It's very big of him.

• 37:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  And when you look at the sales, the critical reputation of The Leopard, it is by far the most successful Italian book of the 20th century. It's got that rare thing of a book that is simultaneously a great critical hit, as in, anybody who likes literature, who fancies themselves as quite highbrow, will tell you they love The Leopard. But at the same time, ordinary readers love it too. So it's, it's regularly voted the most beloved Italian novel of all time.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  Welcome back to the book club. So before the break, we were speaking about Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampadusa, and now we are going to turn to the work itself, his great work, The Leopard. So Dominic, we kick off in May 1860. What's going on? Give us a little bit of historical context.

• 37:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, a little bit of history. So the book opens in May 1860, in the middle of the great historical drama of Italian history, really, the Risorgimento, the resurgence. When the book opens, there is no country called Italy. There's a geographical location called Italy, but on the Italian peninsula, there's basically just this mosaic of different states belonging to different people. So the Selena family, our hero and his family, they live on the island of Sicily, which is part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which is basically the Kingdom of Naples. And Naples is ruled by the Bourbon dynasty. So this is a sort of offshoot of the ruling house of Spain, and indeed, previously of France.

• 38:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sicily itself is very rural, very backward. People work on the land, and it's this sort of feudal system dominated by a handful of rich aristocratic families. But at the beginning of the book, this world is under threat because Italian unification is underway, and it's spearheaded by the rich northern kingdom of Sardinia, confusingly ruled by the House of Savoy with its capital in Turin, but people often describe it as Piedmont. So basically, it's four different names.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  Well, I was reading up on this yesterday. I had to get up a map.

• 39:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Let's just say Sardinia for short. So they are pushing a project of Italian unification where they want all the states to come under the rule of the kings of Sardinia. And in May 1860, the Sardinians sent an expedition under the revolutionary nationalist firebrand Garibaldi with the red shirts to land in Sicily. It's the expedition of a thousand, because there's about a thousand of them. They land at Marsala on the 11th of May. They fight their way inland. Fighting breaks out in Palermo at the end of the month. It's sort of local, there's an uprising against the Bourbons. By June, Palermo has surrendered. The Bourbons have been kicked out, and Garibaldi has won. And that's the backdrop to the first

• 39:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  couple of chapters of the book. And at the time, this was seen as an incredible feat, that basically Garibaldi in his red shirts had landed, they'd defeated the armies of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and toppled the regime. And this inspired great excitement and adulation among liberal types, people who believe in progress, and people who are well-meaning, and they're progressives, I suppose. And all over the world, people are very excited about Garibaldi, hence the biscuits.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  Rubbish biscuits.

• 40:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, Garibaldi's a great biscuit. Tabby, what?

• 40:25Speaker 04

  I disagree.

• 40:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  You don't like a Garibaldi biscuit?

• 40:26Speaker 04

  Does nothing for me.

• 40:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, we're going to have to pursue this later, because otherwise we'll run out of time. But surely we could do a live biscuit tasting?

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, with rum.

• 40:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Where's the rum come from there? That's a bit left field.

• 40:36Speaker 04

  I don't know, I just thought that would be a nice touch.

• 40:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, the autumn of 1860, Sicily holds a referendum, a plebiscite, on whether to join this new Kingdom of Italy under Sardinian rule. And this is what Fabrizio is thinking about in chapter three of the book, this plebiscite. And in the book, people who've read the book will know, the plebiscite is rigged, and in Donna Fugata, their country estate, the result is 512 votes yes and zero votes against. And Fabrizio's huntsman retainer, Don Ciccio, is absolutely furious about this, because he says, "I voted no and no one counted my vote."

• 41:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, this is the reality. Because in Santa Margherita, in reality, which was the model for the country estate, there were 999 electors in Santa Margherita, and 993 of them supposedly voted yes. And actually, when you look at the whole island of Sicily, the official figure showed that 99.8% of them voted yes, and then three-quarters of the districts of the island, nobody at all voted no. And this was obviously totally untrue.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's pretty corrupt.

• 41:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, Sicily joins the new Kingdom of Italy, and everybody who supports this says, "Oh, this is absolutely going to be brilliant." So in the book, the prince has an accountant, a steward called Russo, who's very much in favour of all this, who says to the prince, "We'll have liberty, security, lighter taxes, ease, trade, everything will be better." But obviously, anyone reading this book in the 1950s would know that things did not just get better. Basically, what happened was the feudal elites didn't want to accept the changes that had come in. There were lots of revolts by the peasants, because the peasants complained they were having to pay more taxes under the new regime. They didn't like the northerners. I mean, Sicilians still do not like what they see as the imposition of the

• 42:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  heavy hand of, you know, the Italian mainland. And this is actually the era after the Risorgimento, when you see the rise of the mafia, because the old feudal order is breaking down, the local elites get these companies of armed men to defend their estates and stuff. And these, over time, evolve into the first mafia clans. This is what explains the very grimly ironic tone of the book whenever Lampadusa is talking about politics, because his readers will know that Sicily doesn't move into this shiny utopian future.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  That the future for Sicily is stagnation and violence. And, you know, his characters are often trapped by their own idealism.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, because they don't know.

• 43:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  They can't see all this coming. They don't know this. They don't know what we know.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Although, one of them does know.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is a character who can see into the future because he's a skeptic and because he's a kind of small c conservative and he is so cynical. So he thinks, well, nothing ever changes. And if it does change, it gets worse. And this is the guy who speaks for Lampadusa, who is the protagonist of the book, Don Fabrizio. And Tabby, I think you described him as the sex, didn't you describe him as the sexiest character in fiction?

• 43:43Speaker 04

  He's a very, very attractive character, because despite the fact that he has this incredible kind of foresight or insight into the fact that his world, the world as he knows it, is declining and fading away. He kind of takes it in his stride. He maintains this sort of sense of mastery. He's never embittered. He's languidly laconic about the whole thing. And he's a very sensual character. So in the first chapter, he visits a brothel in Palermo after dinner. And it's kind of a sign of his dry, slightly ironic character that he makes his kind of confessor, his priest, Father Porone, come with him.

• 44:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he drops him off.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Which is so amusing. Yeah. And then there's a very funny scene when the priest asks to speak to him and he's having, you know, his size is constantly emphasised. He's a very like leonine man. He's massive.

• 44:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  But not fat. And there's a scene where he's having a bath and then he invites the priest in. He stands up and he's completely naked and this poor little priest is kind of awed by.

• 44:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, by the size of him.

• 44:46Speaker 04

  The vastness of him. Yeah. But this first chapter, it also gives you an insight into his reflectiveness and his self-loathing. He thinks about Maria Nina, so she's the young woman at the brothel, and he feels sad at the thought of that manhandled youthful flesh that resigned, that resigned lubricity. And he thinks of himself as a pig, just a pig. But, so he's never one thing at once. And he remains, to me anyway, a very central figure right to the end, even though he's kind of depleted and exhausted and apathetic. And he's intelligent enough to see that his world is dying. But he's cultivated enough to observe that death with kind of beautiful serenity and enduring charm.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  And his spiritual exhaustion is kind of more appalling, thanks to this physical size, because he is, it's like he's a god who's been made into a mortal. He doesn't belong in the human world where it's with its indignities and its vulgarities and its politics that don't really matter. And this is why he loves astronomy, you know, something that dwarfs human affairs. It's constant and it's ordered.

• 45:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a sense of him being above the petty grind, isn't there?

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Definitely.

• 45:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the shabby compromises of politics. And so when he's actually invited to join the new senate of the Kingdom of Italy, he says, no, it's not for me. And he's yearning for something. He's got this kind of, there is a definite yearning to him, isn't there? There's yearning for something more profound, more metaphysical, hence the stars.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  In a way, he is yearning for the old age, you know, when he goes to Dora Fugata. He's reassured by. By the peasant's kind of obsequiousness, it reassures him. But at the same time, there's always something more because he's much more than just a mortal man, in a sense. For instance, there's a scene when he's talking to Father Perone about astronomy and his own observatory. And, you know, he sends reports to foreign scientists and he explains the reason he loves stars is they were distant, they were omnipotent. And at the same time, they were docile to his calculations, just the contrary to humans, always too near, so weak and yet so quarrelsome. And at the end of the book, on his deathbed, he thinks about the rare moments in his life that he was truly happy. And these hours of of being in the observatory are among them.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  And when he got a letter complimenting him on some calculations that he did on Halley's Comet or something.

• 47:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  And then when he got a medal from the Sorbonne and the earthly sphere is never quite enough for him.

• 47:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's the thing. He's a complicated character. There's different sides to him. He's the patriarch. He's a man of flesh and blood. He's an intellectual. But I think the thing that so makes him so satisfying as a character for me, cynical people are often very good observers of others.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're watching for what's going on under the surface. And as a very cynical, aloof person, he is a brilliant observer of his world and of himself. And I was thinking about this sort of reflectiveness of him and the way in which this is done through this kind of stream of consciousness style.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  I was thinking how funny it is because we did Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf a few weeks ago. And I know there are some readers who really dislike, they dislike even the thought of Mrs. Dalloway and even the thought of Virginia Woolf.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  It annoys them.

• 47:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  It annoys them. And yet they would say of this book, oh, it's absolutely brilliant. I love this leopard. Oh, one of the great books, body, body, blah. But actually, the style and the techniques, I think, are not so different. So Lampard Dusser, who liked, you know, a new Virginia Woolf's work, flashbacks, memory, stream of consciousness. Everything filtered through the subjectivity of one central character, then passages of very lush description. You know, this is the kind of thing that you get in the kind of modernist writers of the 1920s and kind of fragmented, a fragmented narrative that's made up of a series of set pieces.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Jumbled timelines.

• 48:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, jumbled timelines.

• 48:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, Lamparduce was clearly modelling this on some of the writers, the 20th century writers that he's read. But because it's set in the past, because it's by a man about a man, and because it involves like Garibaldi and whatnot, people don't seem to notice.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  And it's by an aristocrat, about an aristocrat in the last years of his of his age, really, in a sense.

• 48:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So the other question about Fabrizio is actually whether he is Lamparduce himself. So we said before that he, the model for him is Prince Julio, Lamparduce's ancestor, the astronomer and whatnot. A lot of Lamparduce's friends said, you have given Don Fabrizio your own personality.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  But I think it's funny that he wrote that himself.

• 49:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. People are saying that I've done Fabrizio.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  That I remind them of the dashing and extremely sexy lionine.

• 49:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are different, so the pessimism, the sardonic, dry wit, the scepticism about human nature, the introversion.

• 49:27Speaker 04

  And politics.

• 49:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the solitaryness, the politics, all of those things they have in common. They're also both very passive, actually. So we said that Don Fabrizio is an alpha male, but he actually doesn't really do anything. At one point, he's described in the book as watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move towards saving it. So he's just watching but not acting. Both of them feel that they're trapped between two worlds. So the prince says at one point, very celebrated line, "I belong to an unlucky generation swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both", which is very Lamparduce. But, well, I mean, I'm sure you're just as cynical as he is, Tabby. So the portrait of a very,

• 50:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  very sexy, sensual, charismatic character. This is basically Lamparduce as he would like to have been.

• 50:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that's, I think that's quite touching, you know, for an awkward, shy person who loses himself in kind of the great deeds of others in books. Of course, there's a little, going to be a little bit of wish fulfillment in that.

• 50:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course. What about the other characters?

• 50:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, there were two other main characters that kind of grabbed the reader's attention. And the first of these is Tancredi. So this is his nephew in the book, Don Fabrizio's nephew. And Lamparduce was said to To have based Tancredi on his young cousin, Giochino Lanza, and he adopted him before his death, and he was extremely fond of him. I was reading a lot of his letters to him last night, and they're, they're quite touching. And he was one of the young men that went to Lampa Dusa's book groups. And in a letter to a friend, he wrote that Tancredi was morally and physically Gio, you know, because he's funny and he's charming and idealistic.

• 51:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 51:06Speaker 04

  And I've never seen the film, but who plays him in the film?

• 51:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  In the film, he's played by Alan Delon, and he is so handsome.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  So very handsome.

• 51:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so dashing.

• 51:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's, he's really, really smooth and charismatic in a slightly lounge lizard way. But I think that's how he is in the book. It's a bit too smooth.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  I think that's why Tancredi is actually a brilliantly complex character, because when I first read the book, I found him very attractive, you know, charismatic, excitable, full of energy, charming, sinewy, lithe, wicked, totally my type.

• 51:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think the sinewy and lithe, I think that's you're projecting on that. I don't think that's in the book.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  But he's a kind of this slim figure, isn't he? Maybe that is in my head. God. I've been fantasizing about Tancredi. But then when I read it this time, I found him much less attractive. And also, he wears that sexy eye patch. That's automatically.

• 51:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course. And Alan Delon, when he wears the eye patch, does look very dashing.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  This time I read it, I read him as much more the survivor. He's a better survivor than the rest of his class. So while he's milking his own class and his uncle for money, he's turning his back on them and he's infiltrating the new world. So via, you know, he, he joins Garibaldi and he, you know, will learn through his marriage. He's a survivor. He is a bit of a social climber. He's a great adapter. And this is why in the book, his role is also symbolic, because he represents elements of the old guard who have embraced the cause of Italian unification. But you never really know with Tancredi if, if it's because he's genuinely idealistic, or if it's because he knows this is the only way to survive.

• 52:44Speaker 04

  Because that's the thing. I think he's quite naughty and quite calculating. And that's why Don Fabrizio both admires and distrusts him. Because, you know, El Este. Knows that Tancredi is the only part of him that will survive in the new world. But the way that Tancredi really lets himself down is he's quite cruel and insensitive, and particularly to his cousin, Conchetta. So she is the princess daughter.

• 53:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and she's, she's very serious, isn't she? Very pious.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  Very pious.

• 53:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's completely in love with him.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  She's totally in love with him. She's, you know, she's very upset by the eye patch and stuff. Because I don't know why, she's just very excited by the eye patch.

• 53:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, he destroys.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  She should lean into it.

• 53:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  He destroys her entire life by telling an inappropriate anecdote.

• 53:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, a bad anecdote. You know, she is born at the worst time because she's going to live to see everything that she knew disappear around her, but she's still a part of it, a bit like Lampedusa. So the anecdote that destroys Conchetta's life. So Tancredi and his mates capture a convent and the elderly nuns are frightened that they'd be raped. And then one of Tancredi's friends shouts, nothing doing sisters will be back when you have some novices. It's great banter. And then they leave the nuns with, I quote, their tongues hanging out. Tancredi is implying that, you know, they're lusting after these lovely young men.

• 54:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  The nuns were.

• 54:04Speaker 04

  The nuns were, which is poor from Tancredi, I think. I think all of this is poor from Tancredi.

• 54:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  But then Conchetta, who, you know, weeps on her way to mass, is so appalled by this. Whereas her love rival and foil, Angelica, who I was voicing in the opening reading. And she represents everything that's new and predatory. And she says, what fine lads you must have been. I wish I'd been there with you. And I, you know, you so know that girl that jumps on the bandwagon with the boys because she kind of wants to be fancied by them a little bit. And then Tancredi says, had you been there, Signora, we'd have had no need for novices. So it's top wooing there.

• 54:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Angelica loves this.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Angelica loves it, yeah. And Conchetta's horrified and she bursts into tears and she storms off. And I actually feel very sorry for Conchetta. I think hers is a very sad trajectory.

• 54:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  So what about Angelica? So let's talk about Angelica. So the important thing about her is she's from a different class. She's from a lower class. She's the daughter of this rising corrupt businessman slash politician called Don Calodaro Sedara. And so she is the representative of the middle classes.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  But she, she, she, she goes after what she wants, which is Tancredi with, you know, sensuality and her attractiveness and.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  She, you know, that's why her relationship with Tancredi is quite, is a very cynical portrayal of love, because they're both, what, they both want something from the other one. They're in love with each other, but it's not love. And they're excited by the performance and the possibility of what they could achieve together, whereas Chetan loves him truly and kind of emotionally.

• 55:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's in love with being in love, but she's not in love with him, isn't she, Angelica?

• 55:45Speaker 04

  He'll give her a title, he'll give her validation.

• 55:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  And she will give him a passage into, into the future.

• 55:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, she'll give him money. I mean, she's bringing loads of money and she's gorgeous. So they're both prizes for each other. They see each other as a prize rather than as a person, I think. So, you know, when he tells his terrible anecdote, his rape anecdote, which is poor from him, and she laughs, and in the book, she gives this, she describes it as giving a strident laugh, but in the film, which I love, she gives, it's Claudia Cardinale, and she, who is, I have to say, the most wonderful actress, I mean, and she gives, yeah, this incredibly husky, dirty laugh at this anecdote.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 56:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is the clue to her personality.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  It is.

• 56:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  That there is a kind of earthiness and a sensuality to her. And actually, just on the, you know, it's easy to be very cynical about the romance between them, but there's a chapter, which is actually brilliantly done in the film, when they are exploring the palace and it's got loads, it's got so many disused rooms, it's all very dusty, you know, they're unlocking doors and this, the two of them will go off in these expeditions together. And I think these are, without sort of betraying myself too much and getting into therapy, I think these are, this, this is a very, very erotic scene.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  No, no, in truth, it actually is. You know, in a book that is so much about sort of the passing of time and the law and loss, it's a book that's, it's a, it's a passage that's full of movement and excitement and possibility. This is not a book overflowing with possibility, it tends to be about loss.

• 57:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the, but the eroticism of it comes in the fact that the possibility, it's possibility, but not actuality.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 57:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because they are, they are simmering with desire for each other as they explore the palace and they will have a snog or whatever. But they can never fully act on their desires. So as Lampadusa says, the dangers of stopping the game and drawing the prize became more and more pressing for both. In the end, they searched no longer but went off absorbed into the remotest rooms, those from which no cry could reach anyone from the outside world. But there never would be a cry, only invocations and low whimpers.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  There they would both lie, close but innocent, pitying each other. So they can't bring themselves to kind of go the whole hog, as it were. But they are, there's this sort of simmering electricity between them, if electricity can simmer.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  It's so sexy from Lampadusa, it really is. I think people forget this about the leopard. It's a very sexy book. And but then, but then that is also, you know, what's so kind of creeping about it or depressing about it is that we get, we get kind of a look into their future. And, you know, when it is, when it finally is realised and the possibility becomes reality. And we kind of learn that they end up being quite unhappy together. And this is, this is the best that it will ever be for them. The bit when they hadn't quite captured each other. It's the old thing about the chase and wanting what you can't have.

• 58:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's one of the best examples in literature, I think, of the chase.

• 58:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  So this is another example of how this is not just a historical novel. Because what he's doing here is a very, very modernist sort of trick of puncturing the allusions to the present by suddenly abruptly throwing forward into the future. So he will say, you're, you're, you're absolutely loving this, you know. You're immersed yourself, you're wallowing in the eroticism of these passages.

• 59:03Speaker 04

  You're tricked into thinking it's a love story for a moment as well.

• 59:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then suddenly he says, these would be the best days ever for Angelica and John Cready. Lives later to be so variegated, so erring against the inevitable background of sorrow. But of that they were still unaware, in their pursuit of a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. You're like, what? This isn't, this is all going to go, yeah, it's going to turn to ashes. And when he goes on to say, when they were old and uselessly wise, their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret. So he's really kind of stabbing your romantic allusions about this couple.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And that's what he does throughout is he'll set things up and then he'll say, in the future, of course, they would end up hating each other and they would all be incredibly corrupt and miserable.

• 59:48Speaker 04

  But it's the same with that, with the wonderful ball scene, which is glorious. It's kind of the climax of the novel and it's when Angelica asks the prince to dance and for a moment he feels virile again and then it's punctured almost immediately. So from the ceiling, and this is what I was referring to earlier, from the ceiling, the gods reclining on gilded couches gaze down smiling and inexorable as the summer sky. They thought themselves eternal, but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was to prove the contrary in 1943.

• 1:00:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's such a good sentence because that bit where he, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's romance and it's classicism and it's, and it's eternal. And then it's like the mundane

• 1:00:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  industrial quality of what punctures it. And that is also what kind of the book is about. He's not saying that aristocracy are great or that the middle class is terrible. He's, you know, pretty negative about both, but he's saying, you know, this mundane order of, of kind of the bourgeoisie or whatever come up.

• 1:00:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  And they take on the guise of the aristocracy, they put on their uniforms, but they're made of, you know, nothing is getting better.

• 1:00:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  It's continuity, change is continuity.

• 1:00:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Pittsburgh is replacing Palermo. That's basically the sort of, if you could sum up the book in a few words.

• 1:01:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually that, you see, the film doesn't have any of that at all because it doesn't have the narrative voice. So you don't have the bomb in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You don't have it throwing forward to Tancredi and Angelica. The Angelica's future, their disappointment when they finally get together. Actually, the film just wallows in the, in the glamour. And it's a wonderful film for that, but it doesn't have that extra layer, I think.

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the fact that when he looks around, it's like a funeral pyre, the ball scene, isn't it? Magnificent for the last time. And he literally, by dancing with Angelica, kind of embraces his death and he looks around him and all the faces around him are kind of sad or ghoulish or, and you couldn't convey that.

• 1:01:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I think, I mean, you mentioned the, the, the beginning, the first chapter, the, the sort of sense of decay and the sort of putrid rottenness of the garden, as well as the beauty and the sensuality. And I think that runs through the whole book, the idea. Well, there's a couple of ideas about decline or change. So the first idea, I guess, is that Sicily can never change because Sicily, of all places, is uniquely resistant to change. It's trapped. It's trapped by its own history and by its own culture, I guess.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, and this is captured in the princes' meeting with the northern politician, Chavalli, who comes to ask him to join the new senate. So first of all, he says, "We'll never change because we've been so deeply marked by colonialism", you know, wave upon wave of different conquerors in Sicily.

• 1:02:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  So he says, "We are old, Chavalli. We're very old. For over 25 centuries, we've been bearing the weight of superb heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside. None made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We're as white as you are, and as the Queen of England, and yet for 2,500 years, we've been a colony. I don't say that in complaint. It's our fault, but even so, we're worn out and exhausted." But then he says something that's slightly different. He says, "We'll never change because there's something uniquely Sicilian that makes it impossible. It's the barren landscape, the blistering heat, it's the atmosphere of Sicily, the climate, forces that have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than alien pressure

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  and varied invasions. This landscape, which knows no mean between sensuous sag and hellish drought."

• 1:03:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and that's, he's saying basically, we've become, we're lazy. He says we're arrogant. You know, we think Sicily is perfect and we don't want to improve. And, you know, change happens, but basically, people, you know, generations of people have tried to change Sicily, and the change always is evident and it collapses.

• 1:03:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because Sicily is enduring and it's old and it's, you know, nothing will ever be different. That's, this is fatalism, I guess, that he has.

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  New beginnings are an illusion. Humans are fundamentally self-interested. Nothing can be done. So just like he is, he passively rolls with it.

• 1:03:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that's the idea that nothing ever changes and everything is the same. But then the other idea, which is slight tension and contradiction to that, is actually, things are changing, but they're just getting worse.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So. People who write, you know, whenever somebody writes an article in Unheard about the leopard, which seems to happen like every month, and they'll quote the leopard, and they'll say, they'll quote this line from Tancredi, when Tancredi says to the prince, "Why am I backing the revolution? Because if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

• 1:04:25Speaker 04

  Such a famous line, isn't it?

• 1:04:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And anybody who's like a sort of think of themselves as a, as a thinking conservative, "I'm a cerebral conservative," they will always love quoting this line, like, "Some things have to change," you know, you're David Cameron or something, and you're introducing gay marriage, or whatever it might be, and you're doing so precisely so that things can stay the same.

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  Can stay the same.

• 1:04:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. But Fabrizio doesn't think that things are staying the same. He thinks things are actively decaying. And actually, Lampedusa clearly thinks that to some degree, because this character we mentioned, Angelica's father, Don Colodoro Sidara, the guy who wears the wrong coat to dinner, which is a terrible thing.

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  Terrible.

• 1:05:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's dressed in an inappropriately fancy coat, a tailcoat.

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  That is embarrassing, to be fair.

• 1:05:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, he's corrupt, he's ambitious, he's small-minded.

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  He's slimy.

• 1:05:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's mean-spirited. Don Fabrizio feels a loathing for him at the ball, actually. He says he feels a loathing for him, a loathing for the rise of this man and a hundred others like him, their obscure intrigues, their tenacious greed and avarice, and this is bound up with the sense of death that hangs over the palaces. And the prince makes the same point to the northern politician, Chevalier. He says, "Things will be different, but worse. We were the leopards and lions, but those who will take our places will be little jackals and hyenas." So on the one hand, Sicily is never, Sicily's always the same, but then on the other hand, actually Sicily is getting worse, because the people who succeed us are corrupt and vicious and, you know, all of this.

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  But you can see why liberals would say, "Oh, that's because the people coming up are not of the old order." You know, they're new people, they're kind of industrious, or whatever it may be.

• 1:06:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course. They would say, "This is the snobbery, this is the snobbery of the old elite."

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  But Lampedusa, he did, he did personally disdain political liberalism. I mean- You can undoubtedly see that. He called it play acting, a noisy romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes. So obviously, the great liberal totem in Italy is the Risorgimento. But in The Leopard, this is basically, it's all just a fraud. You know, you see that in the count up of the plebiscite. And that's why it's so important in the story. It's a symbol of the dishonesty and the corruption of the whole project, which is seemingly introducing kind of a utopian new future where everything will be different and there'll be equality. And Lamperdusa is saying that it never meant anything. It was just corrupt.

• 1:06:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the prince reflects that Italy was born that night when they all voted to join the Kingdom of Italy in the plebiscite. But he says, "The same night, something died, a newborn babe, good faith, just the very child that should have been cared for most, whose strengthening would have justified all the silly vandalisms." But I mean, it's a fair point, you know, this, this, he's basically saying Italy was born corrupt. It was born a fraud, meretricious, because they falsified the results of the referendum and they just couldn't allow people to choose freely. From the very beginning, it was tainted. So there's a sense that there's a, the decline and the decay are built in politically. So when I first read this book, I thought a lot about the politics and the history of it. But reading it this time, I think particularly

• 1:07:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  because, you know, we've done so many books that are quite reflective in this show, not least Mrs. Dalloway, which I thought of a lot when I was reading this.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Mrs. Dalloway, rather like this, is a book about death. And death runs through this book from the beginning. Lamperdusa writes it at a point when he's feeling that time is ticking, he's about to be diagnosed with lung cancer, his own death is very much on his mind. And I think, even though he might have started it thinking, I'm going to write a book about the 1860s, I think ultimately, this is a book about a man who's come into terms with his own mortality.

• 1:08:07Speaker 04

  And also who feels that his whole life has been slightly futile.

• 1:08:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, that his life has been wasted, really. Exactly like Lamperdusa's life. So the very first sentence of the book is the last line of the rosary, isn't it? "Non et in hora mortis nostrae, amen. Now and at the hour of our death, amen." The very first line. Then, the palace is compared to a cemetery. It literally smells of death because of the body of this dead soldier that they found in the garden. Fabrizio says to Chevalier, the guy from the north, all Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really a wish fulfillment. It's a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing, a hankering for death, our langer, our exotic ices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again. But basically, I mean,

• 1:08:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  this is, this is the kind of thing that outsiders love to say about Sicily. But actually, this is a Sicilian himself saying it. But actually, we're in love with death and all, everything is, everything is bound up with this kind of longing for oblivion and this awareness of our own mortality.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  And even when the prince goes to the ball, you know, it's everywhere. Like, you know, it's, it's in the first sentence, like you say, it's, it's in the roses. And then at the ball, he sees a priest rushing to give somebody the last sacraments. And he spends the whole thing. It's why it's so conflicting, because you have this beautiful radiant room and this beautiful girl and dancing and sensuality. But he spends the whole thing feeling like slightly like he's standing on the outside, as if he's sort of walking towards his own death.

• 1:09:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 04

  And then he goes into the library and he sees a picture of a dying man. So that's, you know, the lines from Tancredi that I read at the beginning, black suits you perfectly, but what are you looking at? Are you paying court to death? And obviously, as is typical for the young, death isn't a reality, it's a concept.

• 1:09:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 1:09:51Speaker 04

  And then even when he walks home under the stars, he passes a wagon carrying balls from the slaughterhouse, blood dripping onto the cobble. So again, it's that same contrast between the decorous, stately man, well dressed, walking from a ball, and there's blood on the cobblestones.

• 1:10:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And this is where the film ends. So I know you haven't seen the film, but the film ends right here with him walking home on the cobblestones. But actually, the book has two more chapters that actually hammer this point home. So the first, suddenly the book, we're no longer in the 1860s, we're in 1883, and Fabrizio is dying. And he is thinking about those times when he has been happy. And these times, the sort of flecks of gold or something, they're described as in his otherwise kind of humdrum and disappointing life. They are connected with the different sides of his personality. So they're his family and especially his friendship with Tancredi. They're his sensuality. So, you know.

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  The brothels.

• 1:10:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, the cravats. You remember the great cravats that he's worn?

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  I think, I think you will, you will think over your, your, your greater suits one of the times.

• 1:10:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I might. You think so? I don't think I think about suits. I think about my greatest podcasts, maybe.

• 1:11:00Speaker 04

  Oh, do you have more in the, more in the locker?

• 1:11:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're yet to come, Tabby.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  Oh, I pity you.

• 1:11:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then he thinks about astronomy, how much his intellectual quest for something fixed, for something meaningful, which is the stars.

• 1:11:14Speaker 04

  That exactly, that actually matters, greater than meaningless politics and foibles.

• 1:11:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And you loved this scene, didn't you? You loved this chapter.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  I do, but as in, I love it in the way that I think it's very sad and quite sort of moving. Because the way that this great man faces death with this very serene, mathematical sort of sense of perusal, like he's flicking through it and it's very accepting, he's laconic as always. And his realisation of the insignificance of it all and how, as it turns out, politics change, none of it matters, it's just death. And also the fact that it all happens in this kind of shabby hotel. And this is a man that has come from gilded palaces and rosaries. They're sort of very sad about it. But I think the bit that I was disturbed by even more than that is the final chapter. And I remember even when I was 13, and it is the most blackly ironic and sceptical scene of all.

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  It's a very depressing note to go out on in some ways. So Concetta and her sisters now in their 70s and they're withered spinsters and they're quarreling over their inheritance. And they're brooding on the past. And all they've done with their lives is collect images of death, essentially, you know, photos of relatives and friends who are dead. The stuffed dog, Benedico, and that's actually Lampadus has said in a letter to Gio, he said, oh, he's the heart of the novel. And relics from the past.

• 1:12:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, but they're kind of mad, they've basically been collecting fake relics.

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  The finger bones of the great, great, great, I don't know.

• 1:12:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, some saint or whatever.

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  Duke of Selena or whatever.

• 1:12:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Speaker 04

  And then we learn that Tancredi, with all his vibrancy and dashing youth, he's been dead a long time. And he just became another corrupt politician. And his life with Angelica, you know, so full of sensuous promise, has just been tempestuous and interrupted.

• 1:13:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Interrupted, meaning they've had affairs, they've had separations.

• 1:13:05Speaker 04

  So you know, he almost put, there was a chapter that he excluded from the addition of the book that he tried to, you know, that he was sending out when he died to get published.

• 1:13:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  And it was a scene of, I think it's the prince or the princess rushing to stop Angelica from embarking upon her first affair to save.

• 1:13:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  No way.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  Tancredi's feelings, yeah.

• 1:13:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And the most shocking thing, given how much I love Angelica, is that she's getting old. I mean, that's fair enough. Lampadus is cruel to her, I think. He says.

• 1:13:34Speaker 04

  Very cruel.

• 1:13:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  The illness which was to transform her into a wretched spectre three years later was already active but still secreted deep within her.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  It's horrible.

• 1:13:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  So basically, you know, she's, she's, she's obviously got cancer, but she doesn't know it when we see her for the last time. She's, it takes a spacklet little bit to the garden at the beginning. The beautiful flowers which have the seeds of that kind of rottenness and, you know, within them and about to wither and die. And that's true of Angelica too, that she has become, you know, a corrupt and meretricious and whatnot, but also she's on the, she's become rotten. And this was a point when I slightly thought he was overdoing it. That the cynicism and the emphasis on everything is rotten and everything is putrid, I thought, come on, give them a, would you never give your characters a tiny bit of true happiness or of a lightness as well as the shade?

• 1:14:27Speaker 04

  I think he would say though, that's just the real world though, isn't it?

• 1:14:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  What is, I've literally found a writer even more cynical than I am, and I never thought that would happen. What about the last image of the book? That's a really strange image. So basically the church authorities come and they say, oh, these relics are fake. You have to throw them away. And Concetta is feeling very empty and miserable and she says, um, okay, get rid of the dog, get rid of the stuffed dog, which had been Fabrizio's favourite dog. And they throw him, a servant throws him out of the window. And the last lines, virtually the last lines of the book, during the flight down from the window, its form recomposed itself for an instant. In the air, there seemed to be dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, its right foreleg raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.

• 1:15:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it's this really strange image, I think. So the culture editor of the new statesman, Tanjil Rashid.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, friend of the show.

• 1:15:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Friend of the show who wrote about our show when it came out. He wrote an essay about the leopard last year, I think it was. And he said, in a way, this image is a kind of repudiation of conservatism. So the stuffed dog, he said, is tradition pathetically, pointlessly embalmed, unworthy of holding on to.

• 1:15:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, holding on to the past.

• 1:15:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. But I also think maybe you could say that bit of the dog in flight out of the window, that's like us in our life. We're thrown up into the air and we seem to be dancing as the dog is, we seem to be moving. And then we just land on the ground in a heap of dust and that's our lives. Tapi, I don't want to depress you, but that's your life.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  I don't know though. I don't know. I think, I think it's slightly, it could be interpreted as slightly more hopeful than that, you know, it could be that. It's it's almost like for a moment, he comes back to life and he has the

• 1:16:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 04

  The vibrance and the movement of life. And in that moment, it matters and it matters to live for a moment, even if you do end up in the dust. And the other thing that I think is actually, although it's very sad, slightly counters the the kind of absence of idealism in the book, which is the fact that we learn, Conchetta learns at the very end that they're, you know, that Tancredi actually did love her. And he wanted to kiss her, but her emotional hesitation repelled him. And so he went after the much more vibrant Angelica.

• 1:16:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  But do you know what, Tabby? But then that's undercut straight away because Angelica is in the coach going back or something, isn't she? With the bloke who told the story and she says, Tancredi never liked her at all.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  But you would say that of your love rival, I think.

• 1:16:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  I suppose you would. Well, yeah, yeah, you read into it what you want. I'm surprised your side of me, Conchetta, in this.

• 1:16:50Speaker 04

  I know. What's happening?

• 1:16:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Guilt, I think.

• 1:16:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  We're going to give our verdicts now. Uh, there's so much to talk about with The Leopard. It's such a wonderful book. I really, really recommend it to the listeners. We, I wanted to mark this because I, we've done Dead Dogs. I was going to suggest Stuffed Dogs, but Tabby being Tabby.

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  The dogs have had a hard enough time from us as it is. I would like to rate it out of sexy eye patches out of 10.

• 1:17:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sexy eye patches out of 10. Okay, so I'll go first. It's limiting it to call it a great historical novel, the greatest historical novel. I think it's much better than that. I think it is a great 20th century novel about memory, about nostalgia, about disappointed hopes and about how you make sense of your life as it moves towards its end. So, and I think it's great on history and all of that kind of thing, but that's not what I took from it this time. Actually, what I took was the that the portrait of this very thoughtful, reflective man who's wasted his life and who's looking at his life and the lives of others with this kind of um, very skeptical cynical eye. And I think it's beautifully done. And I think it's a beautiful literary artifact, this book.

• 1:17:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm deducting the point because I wondered on rereading.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  Because he's hard on Angelica.

• 1:18:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because he's hard on Angelica, exactly. Because I wondered on rereading whether the cynicism and the skepticism was a bit overwhelming. And whether the, you know, some of his friends said of Lampadusa that he could be a massive misanthrope. And he has a very dark view of human nature and sometimes possibly too dark. So I'm gonna give it nine out of 10, but it's a brilliant book and everyone should read it. What about you, Tabby?

• 1:18:26Speaker 04

  I'm gonna give it a 10 out of 10.

• 1:18:30Speaker 04

  I just, I love the prose. I just think, you know, as I was reading it, I kept highlighting and highlighting. It ended up being kind of whole pages because it was so perfect, you know, it is a piece of art. It genuinely is. It conveys so much, kind of deep melancholy, like ironic humour, the cynicism. And it kind of does the creep of death, which should be such a depressing thing, and it is a depressing thing. But it does it in a slightly rosy hues, which means it kind of tricks you. And then at the last moment, you realise what it's all been about. It works on so many levels, you know, it has such incredible emotional complexity, decline, contemplation, an element of humour, melodrama, cynicism. There is the prince himself, you know, it's a pleasure to exist in his mind and his, his,

• 1:19:14Speaker 04

  his thoughts are never one thing, he's never one thing. And the loneliness of being the one that sees and yet doesn't hate despite being the one that sees is a great thing. And it manages to turn decline into beauty whilst also laying bare the putrid kind of vileness of it at the same time. And I don't even, and I'm not going to take off that mark for cynicism because I, I think, I mean, obviously I'm a messenthrope. But also because it's coloured with dark humour and there is beauty and, and value amidst all the darkness, I would say. And it has just such grace to it and elegance.

• 1:19:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  It does indeed. Actually, one thing we haven't mentioned, obviously, we're reading it in translation. The translator was Archibald Colhoun, and I think he did it. I mean, I was about to say, I think he did a brilliant job, as though I know, as though I can read Italian, I can't.

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  Famous master of tongues.

• 1:20:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, the English language version is absolutely brilliant.

• 1:20:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, but if you want deep dives into things like this, the translation, the translator, you know, even more exciting things. All you have to do is get your hands on our brand new newsletter.

• 1:20:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, very well done, Tabby. That's a nice link.

• 1:20:20Speaker 04

  Thanks, yeah. And this will have, you know, stories behind the story, bits that we may have missed. Missed out, you can give your

• 1:20:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Read a feedback, yeah.

• 1:20:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, bit of feedback you can you can discuss with other people, what you thought about it. You can give it your own number of sexy eye patches out of 10. It's all very exciting. You know what? It's a vibrant community of book lovers.

• 1:20:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can get this newsletter with more of this amusing banter at thebookclubhq.com. And it's completely free and it has loads of, you know, fantastic stuff. So do do it. Now, Tabby, what have we got to come? We've got a great variety of things to come. Many of them inspired by listeners, actually.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  Exactly, inspired by your requests. So first of all, because the new Odyssey movie is coming out, we have got an Odyssey special and we're doing Cersei by Madeline Miller, which digs into one part of his journey home. Then we have The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buckan, My Brilliant Friend by Eleanor Ferrante, so we're back in Italy, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. So many people requested that one. And Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

• 1:21:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  So loads of fun things to come. All right, I am off to the ball. Tabby is off to contemplate her own inevitable decay and mortality. And on that bombshell, we'll see you next time. Bye bye.

• 1:21:37Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 1:21:48Speaker 05

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