The Leopard

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
historical loss literary fiction philosophical ageing

Our Take

A Sicilian prince watches his world end and does nothing to stop it. Lampedusa wrote this single novel in the final years of his life, and the prince's acceptance of decline is the author's own. Everything changes so that everything can remain the same — except it cannot, and the deathbed scene knows it.

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