The Leopard
A Sicilian prince watches his world end. Don Fabrizio, aging head of the Salina family, sees Garibaldi's redshirts and the rising middle class dissolve the aristocracy he was born into, and meets it with irony rather than resistance. Lampedusa, himself the last prince of a fading Sicilian line, wrote his only novel at the end of his life; the publishers he sent it to turned it down, and it appeared in 1958, the year after he died, then became the best-selling Italian novel of the century.
The famous paradox that everything must change so that nothing changes is Tancredi's line, and the Prince adopts it as a creed early and never wavers, so his fatalism is a fixed position the novel illustrates rather than a question it tests. The grandeur can read as a nobleman mourning his own caste at length, and the closing chapters jump years ahead to deathbeds and a dusty house, leaving the revolution itself mostly offstage. An elegy for the aristocracy written by an aristocrat: gorgeous, and a little in love with its own twilight.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
