The Leopard

All writers of family history should read ‘The Leopard’, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece about the life and times of his aristocratic Sicilian great-grandfather. But don’t bother with reading any Forewords or Introductions – read them later and jump straight into the main story, which begins at the time of Garibaldi's red-shirt campaign on the island of Sicily in 1860.

Perhaps my degree in economics, maths and statistics explains it, and all English literature graduates would scoff at my ignorance, but I can’t believe I knew nothing about this book until it became the latest Melbourne Athenaeum Library’s Book Club title. As a group, we rated it the highest of any book we’ve read in the last three years: everyone gave it 4½ or 5 stars, except for one participant, who grudgingly gave it one star and wondered what the rest of the discussion group was raving about.

The author’s ability to bring his great grandfather to life as a person, to tell us the essentials without burying us in tedious factual detail, was quite extraordinary. Although it is a work of historical fiction it has the same ring of authenticity and truth to it as Harper Lee’s legendary masterpiece, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, which was published around the same time. On a few occasions the author jumped forward to events up to one hundred years in the future, so that we saw the start of something and a brief ironic reference to the finish, without him taking us through the boring chronology of all the intervening steps – an interesting technique, cleverly used and instructive for all family history writers.

This book paints a superb picture of the human condition, especially the inevitability of decline and death in all its guises. Its opening line and closing paragraph proves that point conclusively, but subtly, as the opening line ‘Now and in the hour of our death' is in Latin, its significance easily missed. Although fundamentally sad, it’s a book which uplifts rather than crushes the spirit, perhaps because 'The Leopard' was an astronomer, viewing life and the universe on a grand scale.

You can open the book at virtually any page and delight in the use and power of the language. Its themes of society, religion and politics remain contemporary. And, with its frequent descriptions of the extremes of climate and the landscape features of Sicily, it’s a book which resonates with an Australian reader. It even contains the gorgeous aside that ‘eucalypts are the scruffiest of Mother Nature’s children’.

‘The Leopard’ has encouraged me to begin reading David Gilmour’s biography of the author’s life, ‘The Last Leopard’.