Le Guépard

By: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Narrated by: Denis Podalydès

Le Guépard est avant tout l'histoire d'un homme, Don Fabrizio, l'imposant prince de Salina, qui trouve refuge dans son observatoire pour s'élever au-dessus des querelles et converser avec les étoiles.

Nous sommes en 1860, Garibaldi vient de débarquer à Palerme, le vent révolutionnaire du Risorgimento agite la Sicile. Don Fabrizio voit se défaire la rigueur de l'ordre ancien et assiste impassible à la ruine de sa classe. Lucide et désenchanté, il s'incline devant la force nouvelle qu'incarne son cher neveu, l'impétueux Tancredi, et c'est avec courtoisie, non sans humour, qu'il demande pour lui la main de la belle Angelica Sedàra, fille de don Calogero, dont le grand-père ne savait ni lire ni écrire.

L'adaptation par Luchino Visconti, Palme d'Or du festival de Cannes en 1963, avec Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon et Claudia Cardinale, est un monument cinématographique. Publié en en 1958, le chef d'œuvre posthume de Lampedusa est devenu, en quelques décennies, un classique intemporel. Denis Podalydès nous offre une interprétation impeccable, incarnée et savoureuse.

©1958 / 2002 / 2006 / 2007 Feltrinelli / Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan / Universale Economica / Editions du Seuil (P)2020 Audiolib

Beautiful reading of a wonderful novel

I think we're lucky that di Lampedusa's novel has readers as capable as Toni Servillo for Italian and Denis Podalydès for French. I find that a reader's background tells me more than a sample. In Denis Podalydès's case, it helps explain why his audiobook is top notch.

Podalydès has been a "sociétaire" (a working partner) in the Comédie-Française, the world's oldest theatre company, since 2000. He's both a director and an actor.

The company has two brief trailers on its YouTube channel (Comédie-Française) that provide a taste of Podalydès's work. One is for a DVD of his production of Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia, which is also being performed live this season. The video title is "Bande-annonce "Lucrèce Borgia" de Victor Hugo en DVD".

There's also a trailer for Molière's comedy Tartuffe, which was presented a few months ago. Podalydès played Orgon. The video title is "Le Tartuffe ou l’Hypocrite — bande annonce" . In the trailer, he's the older gentleman with grey hair and a beard.

Podalydès also directs opera. The YouTube channel Opéra de Lille has a video in which he talks about his production of Giuseppe Verdi's comic opera Falstaff, which Opéra de Lille presented this past spring. The video title is "Falstaff vu par Denis Podalydès".

Wikipedia shows that in the last 34 years Podalydès has acted in over 140 films. He's also written two memoirs (Voix off and Célidan disparu), and a screenplay that was nominated in 2012 for a César Award, the French equivalent of the Oscars. The memoirs are the subject of two of his 41 audiobooks in the Audible catalogue. I plan to purchase Célidan disparu, which was published by Gallimard imprint Mercure de France last fall. Célidan is a character in Corneille's comedy Le Veuve.

For Le Guépard, Podalydès uses Jean-Paul Manganaro's 2007 translation rather than Fanette Roche-Pézard's from 1959. Manganaro has talked about his translation in interviews with Le Monde ("Respecter la puissance de l'auteur") and Le Figaro ("Une lutte avec la mort"). There's also a Wikipedia article about Manganaro.