Duke-of-the-Year Club

IPPOLITA (312 pp.)--Alberto Denti di Pirajno--Doubleday ($4.95).

Memo to publishers: sign up all Sicilian dukes of advanced years. They write good novels.

Last year's princely book was The Leopard, written largely in his 60th year by the late Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Duke of Palma. The current entry in the duke-of-the-year club is Ippolita, written by 75-year-old Alberto Denti di Pirajno, Duke of Pirajno. The resemblances between the two novels do not end there. They are both set in the 19th century amid the first revolutionary stirrings of Italian unification. To match The Leopard's feudally lavish autocratic hero, Don Fabrizio, there is the new book's feudally parsimonious autocratic heroine, Ippolita. Both books share the style of an ironic, sometimes witty guided tour through a family album. Lampedusa was the greater craftsman and the subtler artist. Where The Leopard became an elegy for an aristocratic way of life, Ippolita comes close to being an opera about the waywardness of life.

Snopeses of San Lio. Though she acquires titles, Ippolita stems from a clan that was born below the stairs in other people's manors. The Raugeos are Italian versions of Faulkner's wily Snopeses, who grab, trick and weasel their way into the landed gentry. Befriending a Raugeo is as safe as petting a crocodile. Raised to overseer by a count, Ippolita's greatgrandfather snaps up all the nobleman's holdings to make the Raugeos the richest, and the meanest, landowners in the town of San Lio. He passes on the family faith: the land is god; to lose it, or anything on it, is hell. Ippolita's mother tongue lashes the easygoing parish priest for not refusing Holy Communion to game poachers and fish stealers. When Ippolita becomes mistress of the San Lio domains, she visits the orphaned poor, "not of course to bestow money on them--for the poor use money unwisely--but to hand out bits of dried bread and cheese."

This was the age in which Metternich said that "the levels of man commenced with baron." Ippolita marries one--Baron Konrad von Grueber--and it becomes the ruefully comic epic of Ippolita's skinflint life to retrieve her one uncharacteristic act of giving herself to him. The baron is a madcap giant of a hussar, a Homeric drinker and eater, an impenitent gambler, an indefatigable skirt chaser. Ippolita, to whom purse strings are the only heart strings, chokes as her beans-and-mush menus give way to roast pigs, shank sausage and plump capons. She likes to dress like a ragpicker; the baron makes her buy the latest imported fineries. Ippolita doles out fourth-rate wine to the servants in "a quantity congruous for Christians of base extraction." The baron invites them to lap up casks of vintage Vaiano. When the baron goes off to war, Ippolita, with Balzacian parsimony, delightedly returns to her beans and mush, pawns her fine dresses and lights one dim lamp of an evening.

Grave Ghost. The baron returns, some years later, to leave one last raffish memento. But with his death of a heart at tack, melodrama begins smothering the life of Author Denti di Pirajno's novel. At novel's end, Ippolita is not only the sole mistress, but also the greatest monster of the House of Raugeo.

The author depicts peasants, priests and princes with the authoritative relish of a man who has grown up with his subjects without ever growing tired of them. He brilliantly evokes the Italian love of the land that borders on mania and some times crosses that border. The past itself is perhaps the most memorable character in Ippolita, and it is as haunting, grave and startling in its reality as Hamlet's father's ghost.

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