Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s works stretched further than his iconic The Leopard. Mark A. Sammut analyses some of his earlier, lesser-known works.

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The fame of Sicilian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) rests on his posthumously-published super-novel The Leopard, the top-selling novel of Italian literary history.

And yet, when death was just round the corner (and Lampedusa was well aware of it), he had still not savoured any success and had no idea that he would be revered by Italian and foreigner alike.

So, when he wrote the other half of his fiction oeuvre, The Professor and the Siren (translated by Stephen Twilley, New York Review of Books, 2014), he wrote as an unrecognised author unsure what awaited him.

Perhaps, this uncertainty accounts for the vital energy of the three pieces found in this book: The Professor and the Siren, a novella variously called Lighea, and two short stories, Joy and the Law and The Blind Kittens.

Lampedusa spent most of his life in solitary reading, intermittently admiring his wife, an Italo-Baltic divorcee whom he married in Latvia and who would become president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society upon moving to Italy.

These twin characteristics – culture and dreams (the staple of psychoanalysis) – are the fuel on which The Professor and the Siren runs.

The novella relates the story of two Sicilians living in Turin – a young, decadent nobleman intent on bedding women and an old, pompous professor of classic Greek literature – who strike up an unlikely friendship.

Little by little, the old professor takes the young womaniser into his confidence and finally reveals his secret to him: in his youth he made love to a siren.

After that experience, he never had a human woman because no woman could ever convey a love as pure as that of the mythological half-human being. The storyline would be banal were it not couched in a dream-like language.

As is to be expected from dreams, the novella exploits techniques used by the unconscious to communicate with the conscious.

The storyline would be banal were it not couched in a dream-like language

It is, in my view, an adieu letter the dying husband wrote to his wife, to express his conviction that their love was pure, in the psychoanalytic language so dear to her.

The exquisite marriage between the novella’s form and content signals the imminent end of the marriage between the author and his wife as his last day approaches.

The short stories, Joy and the Law and The Blind Kittens, are less oneiric and more down to earth.

To the Maltese reader, they will seem as if Lampedusa were writing about the Maltese… confirming, once again, the Sicilianate character of the Maltese covered by a ‘veneer of British culture’ (to borrow the image Dom Mintoff uses in his undated How Britain Rules Malta).

In Joy and the Law, a dirt-poor clerk happens to be the happy recipient of his colleagues’ pity materialised in an enormous Christmas cake.

It is so big he can hardly carry it and walk, ending up being a nuisance for everybody on the bus. He daydreams about the joy the cake will bring to his famished wife and children.

But, once at home, his wife kills all the joy when she tells him they can’t eat the cake because of a debt of honour they have to pay.

I could picture any number of Maltese families behaving in exactly the same way, with honour being the number-one priority in their lives. Or, perhaps, it used to be like that, and now times have changed…

The Blind Kittens reprises one of the themes of The Leopard: the old nobility impotently witnessing the rise from the lower classes of new landholders who buy vast tracts of land in a society in which wealth is based on land owning rather than industrial production.

To drive the point home, the up-and-coming competitor marries the daughter of a notary, and keeps gulping land, greedily, craftily, swiftly and unabashedly.

The story depicts in self-ironic, hilarious tones how debt-ridden, decadent nobles react to the growing riches of the cunning commoner.

Had the setting been Maltese, it might feel like looking into the mirror on the wall.

This lovely English translation does linguistic justice to the beautifully-woven Italian original, making the read a truly enjoyable one, particularly the novella which transmits the same intensity as in Italian.