Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: Gepard

A Sicilian author (1896-1957) whose most renowned piece of work is also his only fiction. Gepard was later also made into a film by Luchino Visconti. The author served in the army and following the Battle of Caporetto he found himself in a Hungarian prison camp from which he managed to escape. He returned to Sicily after the end of the war, begun to travel with his mother and continued in linguistic studies. It was during that period that the theme of the novel fledged in his head, originally as a story taking place during a single day, as does Ulysses. In 1932 Lampedusa married Alexandra Wolf von Stommersee who was a member of the nobility with an interest in psychoanalysis. At first they lived together with the author’s mother in Palermo, however as a result of many disputes between the two women they soon returned to Latvia. Lampedusa completed the work on his fiction in 1956. He was diagnosed lung cancer a year later. The book was published only after Lampedusa’s death.