Wisdom and Woe

NOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.

The Leopard (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958) begins in 1860 in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. King Ferdinand II ("Bomba") has died, and Garibaldi's Redshirts have just landed on the Italian coast to initiate a military campaign known as the "Expedition of the Thousand." As Garibaldi's army inevitably presses inland, it portends the collapse of the existing feudal order and the emergence of a unified Italian state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.

In the throes of this revolutionary upheaval is Prince Don Fabrizio--decadent patriarch of the aristocratic Salina dynasty with a pride befitting "the leopard" (actually a serval) of his family crest. Fabrizio is simultaneously a staunch Catholic and a consummate womanizer, with a sort of codependent relationship to both sin and confession. Even as the approaching army threatens his family, fortune, and fate with extinction, his favorite nephew, Tancredi, joins Garibaldi's forces, declaring paradoxically, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Controversial at its release, The Leopard soon became a best-seller and is today considered a masterpiece of world literature, often counted among the greatest novels of all time. E. M. Forster called it "one of the great lonely books," known for its depiction of human frailty and melancholy, its poetic "description of a civilization in decline," and its "comfortless and irrational" Sicilian landscape. In 1963, it was adapted into an award-winning film starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale, and as a Netflix series in 2025.

Schedule:

• Week 1: Ch. 1-3
• Week 2: Ch. 4-8

The Leopard:

NOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.

Melville moved to New York in 1863, when prestigious gentlemen's clubs flourished along Fifth Avenue. The city boasted a club for "every conceivable social, political, religious, professional and business interest," but (conspicuously) Melville was one of those "few men of New York" without any memberships. By that time, too, the revolutionary ebbs and flows of the Risorgimento had provoked thousands of Italian refugees to flee their homeland. Many came to New York, transforming it into "a hotbed of Risorgimento sympathies."

The so-called "Burgundy Club Sketches" comingles the two societies--just as it comingles poetry and prose. It is thought that Melville began writing the Sketches around the time of his trip to Europe and the Levant (c. 1876-1877), leaving them unfinished at the time of his death (1891) and subject to various editorial reconstructions since.

The principal characters are the gregarious Marquis de Grandvin--a French socialite (dubbed "a personification and apotheosis of wine")--and the aristocratic Jack Gentian: the Marquis' disciple and Dean of the fictional Burgundy Club. An anonymous editor chronicles their fraternity through a series of biographies, correspondences, and dialogues.

The metaphorical front porch of the collection is "The House of the Tragic Poet," titled after a famous archeological site buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The site--layered with ash, art, time, and mystery--frames the imaginative, geopolitical, and aesthetic scene.

The two most substantial Sketches are "At the Hostelry" and "Naples in the Time of Bomba," comprising a symposium in which the topic digresses from Italian history to the nature of the picturesque. The discussion is dense with references to legendary persons and painters from centuries past, including Bourbon king Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies (1810-1859)--nicknamed "Bomba" ("The Bomb King") for his brutal bombardment of civilians--and the revolts of Masaniello and Garibaldi ("Savoy's red-shirt Perseus").

The "Burgundy Club Sketches" serve a cocktail of red wine and Redshirts, where distinctions of class, time, place, and philosophy are mixed and remixed by editors real and imaginary--past, present, and future--in their more-or-less permanently impermanent form. The version provided for this meetup is based on Sandberg's "reading edition."

Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.

The Burgundy Club Sketches:

[This event is hosted by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, in-person and live-streamed.]

Join us in celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Moby-Dick Marathon, the Museum’s world-renowned tribute to Herman Melville’s epic tale of obsession, adventure, and the sea. Each January, readers and Melville enthusiasts from around the globe gather in New Bedford—the very port where Melville himself once set sail—to take part in a 25-hour, cover-to-cover reading of Moby-Dick.

• Saturday January 3, 11:25am EST - Extracts+start of the 25-Hour Marathon
• Sunday January 4, 1:00pm EST - marathon concludes

NOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.

Simone Simonini, the main character of The Prague Cemetery (2010), wakes up with amnesia in 1897. Suspecting that something terrible has happened, he begins a diary in hopes of prompting his memory and begins reconstructing his past out of Europe's most tumultuous events: from the unification of Italy, meeting Alexandre Dumas, the Paris Commune uprising, the Dreyfus Affair--weaving his story and history into a dragnet of conspiratorial theories in search of a scapegoat.

Simonini was conceived by Umberto Eco to be "the most cynical and disagreeable character in all the history of literature." The Prague Cemetery delves into the unsettling reality of the struggle between truth and deception and how misinformation begets belief. But for all its cynicism and disagreeableness, it "has a level of historical detail coupled with a devotion to aesthetics that you won’t find outside of a novel by Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce."

To assist the reader in navigating the twisting plot, Eco has helpfully provided an ironically-titled addendum, "Useless learned explanations."

Week 1 (January 4): Chapters 1-8
Week 2 (January 11): Chapters 9-21
Week 3 (January 18): Chapters 22-27

The Prague Cemetery: