Comment

manoush
Apr 16, 2015
The author's only novel, published after his death, it is a literary work in its own class. Set against the backdrop of the harsh, beautiful landscape of Sicily in the 1860s, a noble family lives out its last days of prestige. A rising bourgeoisie is set to overtake the nobility, and Lampedusa renders this shift neither with nostalgia nor triumphalism. Perhaps that's the attraction of this novel and its strange staying power. It neither glorifies nor castigates the vanishing nobility; it simply describes their decline in such chiseled, vivid, image-rich prose that a reader can't but be enthralled by the power of imagination.