The Leopard in summer

Heat, decline, and a prince who sees the end coming and decides to be gracious about it.

If winter is for long Russian novels, summer, for me, belongs to Sicily. I finally read Lampedusa’s The Leopard during a week of heat that made the whole apartment feel like the inside of a closed piano, and I cannot imagine having read it in any other season.

The novel follows a Sicilian prince as the old aristocratic world gives way to a new Italy. That sounds like a history lesson, and it is not. It is a book about a single, intelligent, vain and surprisingly tender man watching his time end and choosing, mostly, to meet it with good manners.

What stays with me is the texture: long dinners, dust on the road, the smell of gardens at dusk, a ball that goes on far too long. Lampedusa writes about decay as if it were a kind of luxury, and for a few hundred pages you believe him.

I read it slowly, in the late evenings when the heat finally broke, with the windows open and the city noise drifting in. Some books you read. Some you live inside for a week. This was the second kind.