The Spacious Life

TWO STORIES AND A MEMORY (189 pp.)--Giuseppe di Lampedusa--Pantheon ($3.95).

The manuscript of Giuseppe di Lanipedusa's The Leopard (TIME, May 2, 1960) came to light only by accident some months after the death of its author, an old Sicilian prince who had published nothing during his lifetime. The book was, in a sense, a message washed up in a bottle, and this circumstance may partly account for its great popularity.* But there may be another explanation: the yearning of readers in the cramped present for the spacious spirit of the past.

Now another Lampedusa book has washed ashore. It is a minor work, containing nothing as powerful as the portrait of Don Fabrizio, the autocratic old Leopard. But the fine spaciousness of mind is there in the book's three sections: a memoir of the author's childhood homes, a short story and a fragment of a novel.

Stables and Portraits. The memoir is a lovingly conducted tour through what obviously are the stage settings for The Leopard. The best of this recollection begins with Lampedusa's description of the annual family removal from Palermo to the vast summer house at Santa Margherita Belice. The train ride seemed hot and endless to little Giuseppe. There were no toilets aboard; the family bought a cheap brown chamber pot for him, which was thrown out the window just before the end of the trip. The summer house was a vast affair that the author describes as "a kind of Vatican." There were 100 rooms, more or less; quarters for 30 guests and their servants, stables and coach houses, a private theater and a church. The entrance hall was large enough to serve as a gallery for full-length, life-sized portraits of representatives of the family from 1080 until the time of the author's great-grandfather.

Bite and Breadth. There could be no better place for a solitary boy to explore; there was a baroque staircase in one courtyard, set with "superfluous little landings with niches and benches." There was a hinged portrait in a salon, which swung back to reveal a trophy room hung with "guns ranged in big racks, ticketed with numbers corresponding to a register in which were recorded the shots fired from each. "There were, each summer, strolling players who would politely request per mission to perform in the theater. When someone went for a walk, there was a carriage assigned to follow at a sedate pace in case they tired.

Such were the surroundings of Lampedusa's boyhood. As an adult, while the traditions and the estates of the aristocracy passed through their final decay, the author, who did not need to work, devoted himself to learning the world's literature.

Aristocratically, he refused to read translations. Finally, near the end of his life, he began to write. The fragment of a novel included in the present book carries the theme of The Leopard--the ruin of the noble traditions--into the 20th century.

It promises the bite and breadth of the earlier book, and the reader can only wish that Lampedusa had finished it. But true to his tradition, the author's spacious spirit required that time, like everything else, be spent with extravagance.

*33 weeks on TIME'S bestseller list.

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