Final fragments of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Exclusive: Final fragments of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Published here, from a new collection, is ‘The Turret’ by the acclaimed author of ‘The Leopard’

Saturday 04 May 2013

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard, one of the most poignant and enduringly popular novels of the 20th century, left only a few other pieces of fiction when he died in 1957 at the age of 60. A new book, published by Alma Classics in a new translation by Stephen Parkin, collects Lampedusa’s extant shorter fiction and provides a glimpse into the writer’s workshop and the background to the composition of his masterpiece. It also includes the previously unpublished fragment “The Turret”, which we reproduce here.

Portrait of the Author as a Historian / Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Portrait of the Author as a Historian: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Witnessing the slow decline of his native Sicily, the last Prince of Lampedusa saw both blame and possible salvation in the island’s unique location and history, writes Alexander Lee.

Alexander Lee | Published in History Today Volume 66 Issue 11 November 2016

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and his wife, Licy, 1940Whenever Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa thought of the Sicily of his youth, it was always of ‘nature’s Sicily’. Though he had been born into aristocratic privilege and could recall many great events – such as the assassination of Umberto I (July 29th, 1900) and a visit from the ex-Empress Eugénie of France – his earliest memories were coloured by the magic of the Sicilian landscape. Even in the last months of his life he, like the characters in ‘Lighea’ (1956-7), would close his eyes, and recall 

the scent of the rosemary in the Nèbrodi mountains, the taste of Melilli honey, the wavering harvest seen from Etna on a windy day … the gusts of perfume poured by the citrus groves onto Palermo at sunset … [and] the enchantment of … summer nights in sight of the Gulf of Castellammare, when the stars sparkle on the sleeping sea. 

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Julian Barnes (born 1946) is a British author who has published eleven novels, including Flaubert’s Parrot (1984),England, England (1998), Love, etc (2000),Arthur and George (2009) and most recently, The Sense of an Ending (2011), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He has also published three short story collections, including The Lemon Table (2004), and several works of nonfiction, including the essay collectionSomething to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (2002) and the memoir/history, Levels of Life. For more information, visit his official website.

1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857). Of the many nineteenth-century novels about adulteresses, only Madame Bovary features a heroine frankly detested by her author. Flaubert battled for five years to complete his meticulous portrait of extramarital romance in the French provinces, and he complained endlessly in letters about his love-starved main character — so inferior, he felt, to himself. In the end, however, he came to peace with her, famously saying, “Madame Bovary: c’est moi.” A model of gorgeous style and perfect characterization, the novel is a testament to how yearning for a higher life both elevates and destroys us.