David Gilmour’s biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of The Leopard.
One of the great novels of the twentieth century. A book whose imagery, once tasted, haunts the reader forever. The Leopard describes the golden era of the nineteenth-century Sicily in all its sensual, fading, aristocratic glory.
But beneath the surface lurk Sicily’s millennial contagions – corruption, brutality and inequality. Who wrote this masterpiece, this work of art? the answer is as unlikely as one might hope. This is a fascinating meditation on what it is that makes a writer.
Riding the Leopard
The more you read, the more you realize you want to read, for each book generates a further reading list. Only occasional readers imagine that reading is a matter of working through a list of...
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