The Leopard

Prince Fabrizio of Salina watches Garibaldi's redshirts arrive in Sicily and understands, with the aristocrat's fatal clarity, that his world is ending. He does not fight it. He does not flee. He observes, with intelligence and melancholy, the death of the old order and the birth of something cruder but more alive. Lampedusa spent twenty-five years thinking about this novel before writing it in a single burst. The result is one of the great political novels — not because of its politics, but because it understands that history happens to individuals, not to nations. Sicily is a character here: its heat, its fatalism, its stubborn beauty. The famous line — if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change — is the island's philosophy in a single breath.