The Professor and the Siren
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
In the last two years of his life, the Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, in addition to his internationally celebrated novel, The Leopard, also composed three shorter pieces of fiction that confirm and expand our picture of his brilliant late-blooming talent.
In the parable-like Joy and the Law, a mediocre clerk in receipt of an unexpected supplement to his Christmas bonus (an awkwardly outsize version of the traditional panettone) finds his visions of domestic bliss upset by unwritten rules of honor and obligation.
At the heart of the collection stands The Siren and its redoubtable hero, Professor La Ciura, the only Hellenist scholar to claim firsthand experience of ancient Greek—from the mouth of the beautiful half-human sea creature he loved in his youth.
The volume closes with the last piece of writing completed by the author, The Blind Kittens, a story originally conceived as the first chapter of a follow-up to The Leopard, a novel that would have traced the post-unification emergence of a new agrarian ruling class in Sicily, coarser than its predecessor but equally blind to the inexorable march of change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The reputation of Sicilian writer Lampedusa rests entirely on his lone novel The Leopard, written at the end of his life and published posthumously. That said, the title story from this slim collection is a classic of weird fiction revolving around Italian Senator Rosario La Ciura, an eminent Greek scholar and surely one of the most memorable old cranks in literature. His insolent diatribes are gorgeously rendered making it all the more jarring when they give way to a moving recollection of his love affair with a magical and wild creature whose memory beckons the scholar from the deep. "Joy and the Law" is a vaguely condescending workplace fable about a hapless clerk who spends his meager earnings returning the generosity of an employer; and "The Blind Kittens" isn't a story at all, but the first chapter of an unfinished novel concerning the wealthy Don Batassano Ibba, whose holdings may be as exaggerated as the stories the locals tell of his mysterious lifestyle. The recent memory of Italian fascism lurks in the background of these posthumously published stories, which, taken for what they are, reinforce Lampedusa's acknowledged mastery of prose but only the title story extends it.
