TBR.
I am planning to make a bookray out of it....it's a wonderful novel and deserves to be shared with many readers.

Review from www.amazon.com:

„In Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification grows inevitable, the smallest of gestures seems dense with meaning and melancholy, sensual agitation and disquiet: "Some huge irrational disaster is in the making." All around him, the prince, Don Fabrizio, witnesses the ruin of the class and inheritance that already disgust him. His favorite nephew, Tancredi, proffers the paradox, "If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change," but Don Fabrizio would rather take refuge in skepticism or astronomy, "the sublime routine of the skies."

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, also an astronomer and a Sicilian prince, was 58 when he started to write The Leopard, though he had had it in his mind for 25 years. E. M. Forster called his work "one of the great lonely books." What renders it so beautiful and so discomfiting is its creator's grasp of human frailty and, equally, of Sicily's arid terrain--"comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung waves into frenzy." The author died at the age of 60, soon after finishing The Leopard, though he did live long enough to see it rejected as unpublishable. “

After having received a nice PM from a Glaswegian BookCrosser, I decided to offer this novel as a bookring... by the time it's back with me I may well find the time to read it in this translation.

Here the participants' list....

----> YowlYY (start) ----->sent 10.11.2003
Bookbud (Glasgow, Scotland, UK)----->rec. 13.11.2003
Tigger79 (Colchester, England, UK)----->rec. 02.12.2003
librarie (Oslo, Norway)----->rec. 08.01.2004
Zyana (Porto, Portugal)----->rec. 05.02.2004
JesseBC (Chicago, Illinois, USA)
----> YowlYY (end)

....off today to lovely Glasgow :-)

Arrived safe and sound in Bonnie Scotland on Wed. 12th November. Will make a point of reading it sooner rather than later.

Having heard so many good things about this one I wanted to like it, I really did, but despite two attempts, I found it awfully wordy and over-written. It never caught my attention, and I eventually gave up.

I'll send it on to Tigger and wish them better luck with it!

Sent to Tigger77 today, Friday 28th November.

Received from BookBud with thanks. Shall start reading it ASAP.

I really enjoyed this book. It was so nice to be transported back to Sicily 1860s-1880s instead of being in the reality of cold, present-day Britain. I was thoroughly immersed in the world of the book, which is what a good book should do in my opinion.

On to the next person now...

This book arrived safely on 8th January. I hope to get started on it this weekend.

Although a short book, this took me some time to read. It is the kind of novel that requires some concentration to appreciate. This is not because of any complicated or difficult ideas that it contains, but because of the very descriptive language that is used. The landscape and smells and sounds of Sicily seem to come alive if you pay attention to the details. I expect that if I was able to read it in the original Italian, this would be even more effective. The scenes where the priest or Don Fabrizio are trying to explain their reasoning behind decisions or actions to the working people of the island really show the gulf in education and needs for survival between classes at the time.

Many years ago, I saw the Visconti film made of this novel. I hope to find a copy to watch again, as this is what prompted me to read the book.

Thanks YowlYY for giving me the chance to read this!

Posted to Zyana in Portugal on 2nd February 2004

Received today (thanks librarie!) and will try to get started on it sometime next week. I'm experiencing an unexpected bout of Bookrings!