false 30322170 1424027 625094 0679731210 9780679731214 113 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176424490m/625094.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176424490s/625094.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625094.The_Leopard 3.97 678 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.

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