Extract

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

A Sicilian prince watches from his palazzo as Garibaldi's red-shirted volunteers sweep across the island in 1860, and understands with aristocratic clarity that everything is about to change so that nothing will change at all. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, himself the last of a noble line, wrote this single novel in the final years of his life, dying in 1957 before it found a publisher. The book moves with the unhurried grandeur of a man who knows the banquet is ending, each scene saturated with the golden light of things seen for the last time. Its famous formulation, that things must change to remain the same, conceals a deeper melancholy: the suspicion that even this consolation is a lie the dying tell themselves.