Canadian Writers Abroad

Lampedusa by Steven Price (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2019).
Reviewed by Douglas Scott Proudfoot

One of the great tragedies of our tragic age has unfolded on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, among the southernmost points in Europe. Thousands of migrants and refugees, fleeing war and persecution and climate change, or simply seeking a chance at a decent life, have braved the choppy Mediterranean in small boats before being blown ashore on the island. Often at the mercy of unscrupulous human-smugglers, hundreds have drowned, and those who make it to dry land face an uncertain future.

Lampedusa is also the name by which the Sicilian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the last Prince of that ilk, is commonly known. He never set foot on the island (which was said by Arab sailors to be inhabited by monsters), and died before his only novel, The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), was published in 1958. Tomasi’s protagonist, Prince Fabrizio, was modelled on his own ancestor, and the novel presented a portrait of Farbrizio at a time of rapid social and political change, buffeted between two worlds, and at ease in neither.

Despite its initial rejection, The Leopard was swiftly recognised as a masterpiece, translated into nearly forty languages, and adapted into a film by Luchino Visconti. Like Tomasi, Visconti was an aristocrat, but unlike Tomasi, a Lombard and a Communist. He could see beyond the easy interpretation of The Leopard as a reactionary work, and draw out its ambivalence about the passing of the old order. He cast as the lead, Prince Fabrizio, an American, Burt Lancaster, who mouthed his lines in English and was overdubbed in Italian, but who nonetheless brought to the role the melancholy and fatalism of the character. Both Tomasi and Fabrizio were rooted in Sicily, but cosmopolitan in ancestry and inclination, and the cast of Visconti’s film was similarly composed. Alain Delon, as Fabrizio’s charming but opportunistic nephew Tancredi, spoke French, while Claudia Cardinale, who played the beautiful Angelica, symbolising the eclipse of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie, presumably voiced her part in Italian, rather than her native Sicilian dialect.

Seventy years after Tomasi’s death, the Canadian poet and novelist, Steven Price, published, with McClelland and Stewart, a fictionalised account of the author’s last years, when, facing the imminence of personal extinction, Tomasi wrote The Leopard, his meditation on the extinction of a way of life. Writers’ lives are rarely fit subjects for fiction, and if Tomasi only became a writer in his later years, he was a man of letters throughout. His life, or his avoidance of much of the stuff of life, his drifting through time, parallels the parcours of his real but imagined ancestor. Of course, it would be a mistake to see Fabrizio merely as Tomasi’s alter ego, just as Tancredi is not a portrait of Gioacchino, but there is a family resemblance, and their relationships rhyme across the decades. In Lampedusa, Price brings out the resonance between the fictionalised Tomasi and Tomasi’s fictionalised Fabrizio, without falling into over-emphatic alliteration.

Whereas the action in Tomasi’s novel takes place mainly in 1860-62, the years of the Risorgimento, the last chapters leap to 1888, with the death of Prince Fabrizio, and then to 1910, when Fabrizio’s daughter Concetta, is at once deprived by the church of her sisters’ spurious relics, and bitterly learns that she had ruined her life, half a century earlier, on the basis of a silly misunderstanding.

Price’s novel, which focuses on the period in the late 1950s when Tomasi was crafting The Leopard as his health declined, jumps backwards to Tomasi’s youth and courtship of a Baltic Baroness, and his experiences in both world wars. And in a coda set over half a century after Tomasi’s death, bearing the same title, “Relics,” as the final chapter of The Leopard, Gioacchino, Tomasi’s protégé and adopted son, receives a visit from an American documentary film-maker, who wishes to interview him about the reissue of Visconti’s movie version. She seems to Gioacchino to have appeared from another world, “not only a world an ocean away but also a world separated by time, which is the greater ocean.” And in this coda, Gioacchino also reflects on the revelation of a letter from Tomasi, a loving but lost message to his heirs. If Prince Fabrizio left nothing behind but oblivion, Tomasi left Fabrizio, creating an immortal character in an eternal masterpiece, and he left his expressions of love for Gioacchino, perhaps belying his own finding that “love’s eternity lasts a year or two, not fifty.”

We are now farther in time from the main setting of Lampedusa than Price’s novel was from the final pages of The Leopard. But taken together, the two books span a century and a half of Sicilian history, from 1860 to 2003. And both cast back twenty-five centuries to Empedocles and the Greek period in Sicily, when it was the “America of antiquity.” The same thorns, the same sun, pierce Fabrizio and his descendent, just as they did the ancients. But Tomasi, after floating for chapters in Sicily’s “voluptuous torpor,” wrenches the reader of The Leopard brutally into the mid-twentieth century, with references to jet travel, or the destruction of the family palazzo by a “bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh.”   

In Sicily, everything has changed, while remaining much as it always was, in keeping with Tancredi’s cynical but oft-misunderstood maxim, known in Italy as tancredismo: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Price attributes to his characters thoughts which evoke, but perhaps contradict, this expression: “we have lost everything but will recover everything… nothing can be recovered… there is no going back” and “Mussolini had changed nothing and yet because of him everything had changed.”

Price tells us in Lampedusa that Tomasi had originally set out to write an Italian answer to Joyce’s Ulysses, with the action concentrated in a single day. In the end, he produced what is on the face of it a traditional 19th century novel, self-consciously echoing Stendhal. Or perhaps his languorous story better recalls Homer’s Odyssey. Of course, the original Odysseus was no stranger to Sicily, being blown aground there during his Mediterranean cruise; it was also there that he encountered man-eating monsters in the form of the Cyclops and Laestrygones, while meanwhile Sicilian émigrés were among Penelope’s suitors in Ithaca.

I have struggled to write this review, fearing that anything I could say about Lampedusa could only detract from it. I imagine Steven Price would agree that Lampedusa’s greatest virtue is that it sends the reader back to The Leopard. I hope by now that Price’s novel has been translated and published in Italian, and that readers will embark on a voyage across them both. 

STEVEN PRICE’s most recent novel, Lampedusa (2019) won the Ethel Wilson Prize. He is the author of two previous novels, By Gaslight (Macmillan/Picador, 2016), and Into that Darkness (Thomas Allen, 2011). Also an acclaimed poet, he has written two award-winning poetry books, Anatomy of Keys (Brick Books, 2006), which won the 2007 Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Collection, and Omens in the Year of the Ox (Brick, 2012), which won the 2013 ReLit Award. He lives in Victoria, BC. Penguin Random House declined to share the length of Price’s sojourn in Sicily.

Steven Price, CBC Interview: “Sicily is amazing. It’s beautiful. I got to go there in researching the book…” (CBC)

• To read more about refugees on Lampedusa, go to “Migrant shipwreck leaves 21 more missing off coast of Lampedusa,” UN News, and last year’s “Lampedusa: Inside the camp at the heart of Europe’s migrant surge,” by Reha Kansara & Emir Nader, BBC.
• Price reviewed as J.M. Miro for Ordinary Monsters, Toronto Star.
• Steven Price at Pan Macmillan and Penguin Random House.
• The Luchino Visconti film, The Leopard, at MUBI.
• Remake of “The Leopard,” directed by Tom Shankland, uses 7,000+ garments, according to The Globe and Mail, April 8, 2025.
• Empedocles.

Proudfoot photo: Eleanor Proudfoot

Header photo: Lampedusa, David Allen Brulatour, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons