This is one of the most beautiful novels I’ve ever read and it’s also somewhat unnerving because of how often it forces you to confront your own life, your past, and your mortality. Each time the Prince recalls his past or observes the world he currently lives in, I felt myself having to take a deep breath and press on towards what I knew was going to be some vaguely uncomfortable realizations about what it means to get older.
I kept thinking about King Lear as the novel went on, however, where Lear set in motion the engine of his demise by dividing up his kingdom, the Prince here is at the mercy of the times. He lives in a world – Sicily – that instead of being divided and carved up is in the throes of consolidation. Sicily’s unique identity, and thus the Prince’s, is being taken from him and being absorbed. And he’s powerless to do anything about it.
So in a way his story hits even closer to home than Lear’s because of how little control even a powerful man like Prince Fabrizio has over the events around him. And some of this lack of control is not always external, but internal as well. Though a large, powerful man, he’s also a little lazy, and not as smart as he would like. He never seemed able to really manage his estate and solved his problems by selling off tracts of land when he got in a bind. Slowly he whittled his own life away.
Yet it’s not all sad, either. He seems like a man who, though he doesn’t believe it, really did live a full life. He may have spent most of it being indulgent and not working towards any greater good for society, but he did at least enjoy his life, unlike his daughter who realizes much to late she spent her life believing something that was not true – just like her relics.
And when the Prince dies we never get these sense he wasted his life, rather he just wasn’t able to hang onto it. And who can, really? Some families may have long branches that extend for generations, but the tree eventually dies. And what can we do when we are confronted with the fact that life will get away from us all? Well we could try to enjoy it, we could be more like the Prince’s dog, Bendicò, that mischievous doggy who even long after death manages to give one last taste of playfulness about him.
There is no optimistic or pessimistic message here. The novel has no answers, it only explores a life and what it means to confront your own life. That’s why I found it vaguely unsettling at times because these are thoughts I’m not eager to spend much (or any) time dwelling on – better to just live than think about living. Yet there will come a time where everyone has to look honestly at their own life and reckon with their own sense of worthwhile. And we shouldn’t worry so much about the past or about events around us we cannot control, the world is going to change if we like it or not no matter how much we are able to control.
Yet hopefully we’ll be remembered even just a little bit, even if it is just in a small way, the way the image of the leopard is worn by the priest at the end of the novel who carts away the useless old relics.