Jehovah

of this newly discovered author who published nothing in his lifetime. Here we see an aristocrat who studied for his own pleasure the craft of Defoe, Richardson, Flaubert, Dickens, Zola; who had read the classics all his life as a matter of course, and who wrote with great humility and care, incapable of conceiving of any relationship to his work except that of mastery.

So much of Lampedusa’s mind is embedded in the translator’s introduction that one ought to say, without paradox, that Mr. Colquhon’s contribution is the finest thing in the book. The showpiece, however, is the story “The Professor and the Mermaid,’’ an exercise in a favorite romantic motif, an allegorical encounter with supernatural beauty. An aging Sicilian senator recounts to a young man his affair at nineteen with an authentic mermaid. Before we learn this, we are allowed to see on his shelves “the plays of Tirso de Molina, La Motte-Fouqué’s Undine, Giradoux’s play of the same name and . . . the works of H. G. Wells,” that is, the literature of the subject (he misses John Heydon and E. M. Forster), establishing the level of allegory.

SL

About the Author

Sir Shane Leslie

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of this newly discovered author who published nothing in his lifetime. Here we see an aristocrat who studied for his own pleasure the craft of Defoe, Richardson, Flaubert, Dickens, Zola; who had read the classics all his life as a matter of course, and who wrote with great humility and care, incapable of conceiving of any relationship to his work except that of mastery.

So much of Lampedusa’s mind is embedded in the translator’s introduction that one ought to say, without paradox, that Mr. Colquhon’s contribution is the finest thing in the book. The showpiece, however, is the story “The Professor and the Mermaid,’’ an exercise in a favorite romantic motif, an allegorical encounter with supernatural beauty. An aging Sicilian senator recounts to a young man his affair at nineteen with an authentic mermaid. Before we learn this, we are allowed to see on his shelves “the plays of Tirso de Molina, La Motte-Fouqué’s Undine, Giradoux’s play of the same name and . . . the works of H. G. Wells,” that is, the literature of the subject (he misses John Heydon and E. M. Forster), establishing the level of allegory.