Elegy for an Autocrat

THE LEOPARD (319 pp.)--Giuseppe di Lampedusa--Pantheon ($4.50).

In the spring of 1956, Sicilian Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa diffidently handed an unsigned manuscript copy of The Leopard to a friend, who put it away in a desk drawer and forgot it. Lampedusa later dispatched another copy of the story --which he had contemplated writing for a quarter-century--to a publisher's reader, who pronounced it unpublishable. Five days after this news, in July 1957, the cancer-ridden, 61-year-old prince died. Months later, the manuscript in the desk drawer was unearthed and sent to Gian Giacomo Feltrinelli, Doctor Zhivago's original publisher, who recognized its power. The Leopard promptly outsold the bestselling Zhivago, and European critics all over Europe hailed The Leopard as the finest novel to come out of postwar Italy. It may be just that.

Pagan Frieze. It is the story of Lampe-dusa's own great-grandfather, Giulio, set at the time of Garibaldi's landing in Sicily (1860), and the plot of The Leopard is as bare as a sun-seared Sicilian hillside. The hero--known in the novel as Don Fabrizio, prince of the House of Salina--simply lives out the death of his class, the feudal landed gentry. The only action is inaction. But to mistake the story for the subject is to assume that a pearl is about grit. Amateur Novelist Lampedusa's real interest and achievement is to fashion an elegy for a predemocratic way of life, to evoke the melodramatic landscape of Sicily and fix its people against the backdrop of Italy's struggle for unification, like figures on a frieze.

While hereditary estates slip through his fingers, Don Fabrizio is still so much the autocrat of his own dinner table as to curl silver spoons into hoops with his powerful fist during gusts of paternal rage. His sons are sulky, his daughters mute and brittle. His pious, hysterical wife chills the prince's ardors by making the sign of the cross in bed. The lusty prince comforts himself with a peasant mistress in Palermo and scandalizes his docile confessor-in-residence by forcing the poor priest to come along for the nighttime carriage ride.

Sicilian Snopes. Like an embalmed pharaoh, Don Fabrizio is surrounded by his possessions, from powdered footmen to Murano chandeliers, from silver soup tureens to gold-flecked frescoes. When a soldier of the risorgimento turns up in Don Fabrizio's garden to remind him of the passions of the dispossessed, the prince gives his pet great Dane some conservative advice ("One never achieves anything by going bang! bang!'') and retreats to his telescope to contemplate the snobbish quietude of the stars.

But the "Garibaldini." unlike the stars, will not keep their distance. When his dashing nephew Tancredi joins the revolutionary redshirts, Don Fabrizio is forced to applaud the boy's dry, foxy reasoning: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." As his next tactic for keeping things as they are by changing them, Tancredi stoops beneath his class to conquer Angelica, the daughter of a provincial mayor who is picking up parcels of land as fast as Don Fabrizio drops them. The cold calculation and hot sensuality of their courtship, as it rages through the century-old rooms of Don Fabrizio's baroque summer palace, is one of the great set pieces of the novel. It is also tart social satire of the sort Faulkner might write about the mating of a Sartoris with a Snopes.

Time Past. Unlike Tancredi, the prince is too proud, too much the unbending leopard on his own family crest, to be able to lick his wounds by joining those who inflict them. In the mid-span of his life he courts oblivion ("While there's death there's hope"), and measures out the ''sediment of grief which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death."

Urbane, skeptical, ironic and wryly melancholy, Don Fabrizio is a major fictional character creation. Equally vivid are the evocation of the author's home soil and the wit with which Novelist Lampedusa can describe the single-minded gluttony of hungry rustics or the lethal chagrin of a jilted woman ("she wanted to kill as much as she wanted to die '"). But Lampedusa's subtlest effect is to write prose that seems to be aged in marble and encrusted with the patina of antiquity. Like a statue or a ruin, the book congeals a moment of time past and makes it timeless.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.