Lampedusa

 

The past seemed a great flowing passage through which his bloodline passed, back through the wastrel grandfathers and great-grandfathers, to the saints and holy men of the eighteenth century, to the legendary civic figures of the seventeenth and the royal granting of Lampedusa in 1667 and the first Tomasi's wedding to the heiress of Palma, and deeper, back up the coast to Naples, to Capua, and further back to Siena, and then into the fog of an almost time, to Lepanto or Cyprus or the age of Tiberius in Rome. And he understood his great regret: after him would come nothing. He had produced neither son nor daughter. He had failed them all.

In real life, Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi – the last Prince of Lampedusa – wrote his only novel near the end of his life (The Leopard) which was rejected for publication, twice, while he was still alive and has never been out of print since its postmortem release; currently considered the classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it is taught and studied widely. Now, Canadian author Steven Price has fictionalised Giuseppe's life in Lampedusa, suggesting the forces that would have led the Prince to take up novel writing late in life, making clear that when Giuseppe was writing about his own great-grandfather's witnessing of the end of an era (as Garibaldi ushered in the Risorgimento) he was really examining the end of his own era (in the aftermath of WWII), and in a flash of dramatic irony (for how can it be otherwise when an author imagines another author's struggles), Price makes clear Giuseppe's (I suppose any writer's) quest for meaning and immortality. Lampedusa is stuffed with biographical and period detail, has a heavy and elegiac tone, and makes for slow reading. It is also thoughtful, lyrical, and tells the story of an extraordinary life. One thing for sure: now I want to read The Leopard. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

All summer as he had set down his pen and screwed the lid back onto his jar of ink and studied his hands he had seen the flesh of an old man, a failed man. Perhaps, he thought, art could not be created without the failings of its maker. Perhaps it was the very weakness of the writer that made the writing human, and therefore moving, and therefore worth preserving. He had understood for a long time that the world was greater by far than anything he could offer it, and that what he had most longed for, the creation of something to outlive him, a testament in his own hand, would most likely fail in the end. But what he had not understood before was how the strain of the attempt constituted the greater labour. Which, he supposed, as the evenings had lightened in the curtains of his study, was not so very different from the labour of living itself.

According to this narrative, Giuseppe Tomasi was diagnosed with emphysema in 1955, at fifty-nine years old, and this was the primary prompting he (an aristocratic man of leisure who had always read and studied literature for pleasure) needed to begin to write his only novel; the effort taking twelve months and instantly declared a masterpiece by his wife and close friends. Over the course of this year, Giuseppe consciously makes parallels between himself and the fictional prince he writes about, has occasion to contemplate his entire biographical history, and takes trips to various family estates for inspiration and fact-checking; an entire life and its setting is organically related in this way. Between Giuseppe's physical discomfort, his yearnings to be well-received by the literary world, and the regrets that his life has left him with, this is a consistently downbeat read, but I guess that's life; Giuseppe certainly feels real and whole and deserving of empathy.

His gaze would pass first over the dark entrance of a street he knew too well, and it was here that the old quarter lost its beauty for him and became something other than a part of an ancient city on a quiet coastline of Sicily. For Via Valverde opened onto Via di Lampedusa, and he knew that there lay the crumbling plaster and stone of his beloved palazzo, where his mother had lived out her final years, thin, sullen, solitary, a faint reflection of the dazzling creature she had once been, where she had been discovered dead one morning in a ruined armchair in the bombed-out library, under an open sky, one more casualty of a war that had been ended for two years already and yet would not ever end, having destroyed both the past and the future and leaving in the present nothing but devastation and grief.

I wouldn't call this an enjoyable read, exactly – unlike Price's last novel, By Gaslight, which I loved for its twisting plot and punchy language – but Lampedusa is artful and fascinating in its own way. Four stars is a rounding up.

The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Reproduction by Ian Williams


The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.