Steven Price
Lampedusa by Steven Price is a fictionalized biography of Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a Sicilian aristocrat, the last in his family line, and the author of The Leopard, a novel published posthumously and one which became a classic in Italy. Tomasi died from complications of emphysema and lung cancer at the age of 60.
Price conducted extensive research on Tomasi’s life and on the last few years before his death. He portrays him as endearing, cultured, sensitive, and intelligent. Tomasi is a man plagued with anxiety because he is the last in a line of noble aristocrats. Childless, he frets he has no legacy to leave behind, and that with his death, the family line will end. The novel opens with him learning he has emphysema and may not have long to live. He decides to write a novel based on the life of his great-grandfather in the hope of recording the past for posterity. The novel is rejected by publishers during his life time, so Tomasi never witnesses its success.
Price peppers his novel with Tomasi’s memories of his lonely childhood, the solace he finds in books, his military service in World War I, his time in a prisoner of war camp, his meeting and later marriage with the love of his life. Threaded throughout are snapshots of Tomasi’s mother who cast a powerful presence during his childhood and continues to do so even ten years after her death. As Tomasi writes his novel, he makes continuous excursions down memory lane. He visits the once magnificent but now crumbling palazzo where he spent his childhood. And he visits several locations that were a big part of his formative years.
Tomasi’s interiority is deeply moving. He is sensitive, cultured, intelligent, introspective, and deeply emotional. His observations on Italy as it transitions from post war to new beginnings are astute and tinged with melancholy. He grapples with existential questions of the meaning of life and the legacy one leaves behind if there is no one to carry on the family name. He grieves knowing that when he is dead and buried, the past will be buried with him. And he contemplates the connections between his life and his art, on how much of his life is projected on to his novel, and whether his novel constitutes a significant legacy.
Very little happens in the novel. It is quiet; the pace, slow; the diction, lyrical; the tone, nostalgic. Price captures the heart and soul of an aging, gentle man trying to come to terms with his impending death and with the decline of a way of life he once knew. The novel’s strength lies in Price’s poetic language and his ability to capture Tomasi’s interiority with sensitivity and compassion to reflect his feelings of loss of family, class, and culture.
The novel is a moving retrospective of a life, a powerful meditation on aging, a reflection on one’s past failures and successes, a consideration of how one wants to be remembered, and an assessment of what one leaves behind. It is a powerful portrayal of a complex, sensitive man with a mournful and beautiful spirit.