The Leopard

This is my second book report to Rui & Ben.

I had a hard time getting into this book, and only began to realize how good this is after the chapter taking place in Donnafugata. The pace of the book is slow, and there was a lot of characters' relationships to wrap your head around at the beginning. But I soon realized the slow pace, and large time skips between chapters, is actually really effective at telling the story.

My favourite quotations:

Donnafugata with its palace and its newly rich was only a mile or two away, but it seems a dim memory like those landscapes sometimes gloomed at the distant end of a railway tunnel; its troubles and splendours appeared even more insignificant than if they belonged to the past, for compared to this remote unchangeable landscape, they seemed part of the future, made not of stone and flesh but of the substance of some dream of things to come, extracts from a utopia thought up by a rustic Plato and apt to change at a whim into quite different firms or even found but to exist at all; deprived this of that charge of every which everything in the past continues to possess, they were a bother no longer.

“Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tried to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts; [...] All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death, our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative sure is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana.  

The two young people looked at the picture with complete lack of interest. [...] For both them death was purely an intellectual concept [...]. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrow much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.

The truth no longer existed. Precarious fact, though, had been replaced by irrefutable pain.

Reading this also made me realize how much I read while being affected by other books that I love and significant life experiences.