Places of My Infancy (New Directions Pearls)

ISBN: 0811220389

Author: Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di

Condition: New

From the author of the classic The Leopard, an intimate look at an Italian childhood. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusas brief but brilliant writing career lasted a mere two years before he succumbed to lung cancer. In that time he produced one novel (The Leopard), three stories, and the beginning of a memoir, Places of my Infancy - a tour of Lampedusas family estates in Sicily at the turn of 20thcentury. For me childhood was a lost paradise, writes Lampedusa. I was king of the home. Lampedusa gives lush, intimate descriptions of the estates in town and country: the home with its one hundred rooms, its garden with fountains full of eels, its church, its theater where wandering country theater groups would perform, the maids and the groundskeepers, and Lampedusas own family members. Each detail - from his mothers silver comb to his fathers camera (owned in 1900!) unlocks a memory of some event from the era.