'The Leopard' is a novel about the end of an epoch, about the inevitability of dying and decay. It is also about the liberating force of death and the'The Leopard' is a novel about the end of an epoch, about the inevitability of dying and decay. It is also about the liberating force of death and the comfort of eternity. The main character, the last Sicilian Prince of Salina, the head of an aristocratic family witnesses dramatic historic events which change the political and social life of his native Sicily and the whole of Italy. The times are changing, the aristocracy is losing its position in the society, giving way to the go-getting nouveau riche with a new set of values but the Prince (Il Gattopardo) can only observe these changes, he is not able to prevent them from taking place. So, he observes the changes, bows to the inevitable and although these changes cause pain, he never fails to lose his sense of humour. This novel is also an ode to Sicily with its harsh climate, complicated history and Sicilian people who have been conquered many times throughout their history.
'We Sicilians have been accustomed by a long, very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and did not speak our language, to split hairs. If we had not done so we’d never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, the Berber Emirs, with Spanish Viceroys. Now the bent is endemic, we’re made like that.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ '(...)in Sicily it doesn’t matter about doing things well or badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of doing at all. We are old, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We're as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we've been a colony. I don't say that in complaint; it's our fault. But even so we're worn out and exhausted.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ '(...)sleep, dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana. That is what gives power to certain people among us, to those who are half awake: that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life i novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents; that is what gives rise to the extraordinary phenomenon of the constant formation of myths which would be venerable if they were really ancient, but which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a past that attracts us only because it is dead.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than foreign dominations and ill-assorted rapes; this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous slackness and hellish drought; which is never petty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as a country made for rational beings to live in should be i this country of ours in which the inferno around Randazzo is a few miles from the loveliness of Taormina Bay; this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of a hundred and four; count them, Chevalley, count them: May, June, July, August, September, October; six times thirty days of sun sheer down on our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success; you don't know it yet, but fire could be said to snow down on us as on the accursed cities of the Bible; if a Sicilian worked hard in any of those months he would expend energy enough for three; then water is either lacking altogether or has to be carried from so far that every drop is paid for by a drop of sweat i and then the rains, which are always tempestuous and set dry ,river beds to frenzy, drown beasts and men on the very spot where two weeks before both had been dying of thirst. This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (...)in recent years the consequences of the frequent marriages between cousins due to sexual lethargy and territorial calculations, of the dearth of proteins and overabundance of starch in the food, of the total lack of fresh air and movement, had filled the drawing room's with a mob of girls incredibly short, unsuitably dark, unbearably giggly. They were sitting around in huddles, letting out an occasional hoot at an alarmed young man, and destined, apparently, to act only as background to three or four lovely creatures such as fair-haired Maria Palma, the exquisite Eleonora. Giardinelli, who glided by like swans over a frog-filled pool. The more of them he saw the more he felt put out; his mind, conditioned by long periods of solitude and abstract thought, eventually, as he was passing through a long gallery where a numerous colony of these creatures had gathered on the central pouf, produced a kind of hallucination; he felt like a keeper in a zoo set to looking after a hundred female monkeys; he expected at any moment to see them clamber up the chandeliers and hang there by their tails, swinging to and fro, showing off their behinds and loosing a stream of nuts, shrieks, and grins at pacific visitors below. Curiously enough, it was religion that drew him from this zoologic vision, for from the group of crinolined monkeys there rose a monotonous, continuous sacred invocation. "Maria! Maria!" the poor girls were perpetually exclaiming. "Maria, what a lovely house! " "Maria, what a comets by their tails.' ...more
'Invisible Cities' is not exactly a novel. It is rather a collection of short descriptions (or prose poems) of eleven groups of fifty-five fictitious 'Invisible Cities' is not exactly a novel. It is rather a collection of short descriptions (or prose poems) of eleven groups of fifty-five fictitious cities arranged in a mathematical order. Having travelled through all the fifty-five cities with Marco Polo I felt I got a glimpse of the many aspects of the human (as a result, my own) existence - life, experience, culture, memory, time, death and many more... The book is endless as our quest is.
'Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'There is no language without deceit.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.' ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.'...more
'The Decameron' must have been a major breakthrough in the 14th century promoting realism and humanistic values, placing the primary focus on a human 'The Decameron' must have been a major breakthrough in the 14th century promoting realism and humanistic values, placing the primary focus on a human being, his/her virtues and limitations. When we read these stories today, in the 21st century, certain norms of the medieval society make us frown, especially the ones concerning the gender equality. On the other hand, 'The Decameron' is a fascinating window into le mode de vie of the people of all walks of life in the medieval Europe. That made 'The Decameron' a very entertaining read to me. And I loved the satire and humour, of course.
'Every person born into this world has a natural right to sustain, preserve, and defend his own life to the best of his ability.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'A sin that's hidden is half forgiven.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'Wrongs committed in the distant past are far easier to condemn than to rectify.' ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Do as we say, not as we do.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'The nature of wit is such that its bite must be like that of a sheep rather than a dog, for if it were to bite the listener like a dog, it would no longer be wit but abuse.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'Charming ladies, the beauty of a flock of white doves is better enhanced by a black crow than by a pure white swan.'
I greatly enjoyed reading 'Foucault's Pendulum' which is a brilliant multilayered novel that masterfully weaves together intellectual puzzles, philosoI greatly enjoyed reading 'Foucault's Pendulum' which is a brilliant multilayered novel that masterfully weaves together intellectual puzzles, philosophical musings and a human drama. At its core, the book is satire on conspiracy theories, following three editors who, in their boredom (or fear to face their true selves) create an elaborate, fictitious secret history involving an excessive number of real and non-existent organisations starting with the Knights Templar and finishing with the Cthulhu cult. Eventually, the things spiral out of control - the protagonists become obsessed with their own creation and are hunted by the crazy followers of the secret orders. The phantasmagoric and absurd end of the story is probably meant to make us think of all the time and effort (and sometimes life) the conspiracy theories (and other meaningless things) take away from us preventing us from being happy today. Eco’s razor-sharp wit makes the novel hilariously funny, as he mocks the human tendency to find hidden meanings in randomness. Yet, amidst the humor, the story remains poignant, raising deep reflections on the nature of belief, truth, and meaning in a world obsessed with uncovering grand, often nonsensical, connections. Under the surface of a parody the story speaks to different readers in different voices about different things that really matter; growing up, childhood dreams that stay with us, failures, memory, love, meaning of life, dying and death. Isn't it a definition of a masterpiece?
'Incredulity doesn't kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don't believe in them, the collision of two ideas � both false � can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.' ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.' ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Whatever the rhythm was, luck rewarded us, because, wanting connections, we found connections � always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else� ' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to a miracle.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'The universe is peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel.' ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justified birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was � full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'Where have I read that at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late. You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand.' ...more
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