Lampedusa by Steven PriceMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"To live overwhelmed by the past is its own kind of extinction... You must beware of the hardening of the heart."
It all began with watching the Netflix series THE LEOPARD, based on the novel written by the last prince of Lampedusa. A dying, childless prince writing of a bygone world (one kinder and more beautiful than the modern one that has forgotten him), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote only one book in the twilight years of his life. It's now studied by Italian high school students, immortalized in film, and now being discovered by new readers (me included), thanks to the TV show.
This sad, beautiful book is about this dying prince, and the book that will ensure his name lives on, forever. The sadness is, however, a hopeful one, as Price writes: "There were two kinds of unhappiness, the unhappiness of those who look for the sun to set, and the unhappiness of those who look for the sun to rise." Price has written about a man whose sun was setting, hoping to offer a token of his era to the young, tomorrow's dawn.
This reader is doing a twin read of both THE LEOPARD in English translation, as well as this novel on the story of its writing. And I was immediately struck with the sense that Steven Price's book captured the mood of the original inspiration fully, to the point that I had to check whether I was reading about Giuseppe or Fabrizio.
But it's not mere imitation. The author Steven Price, also a poet, has a gift for conjuring moods with words, suffusing each page with nostalgia that becomes very nearly painful at times. And the story behind the story proved to be every bit as dramatic as THE LEOPARD, if not even more so.
"He had been a great man and a man with a fiery purpose and one who had lived in the full light of a savage god."
It's the kind of book that asks the big questions of life, of what purpose all the suffering that comes with the human condition adds up to. It makes one realize just how little time we truly have, all of us, the walking dead.
At the end of the book, Price writes to his wife: "Word by word we build this life." This is very much what Price did for the life of Giuseppe Tomasi, but he went above and beyond mere reportage.
The novel Price has written stands on its own two feet, even if one had no plans to read THE LEOPARD after (although the work is so good, I can't imagine anyone reading it and not wanting to know more about the author behind the classic novel). Wisdom and beauty are found within, as Price writes of loss and life with a grace all his own. I am grateful to have discovered this gem in the high noon of my life, an accidental find turned into a new favorite that I know I shall be rereading in the succeeding chapters of my own short day on earth.
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