Read the book first or watch the movie

ALWAYS read the book first if you are debating this choice.

I saw the movie first, and it didn't ruin the book for me. It provided illustrations in my head. DO read the book, though, whether you do so first or last. It's a masterpiece and a fantastic read.

> Whats best would it be better for me to read the book or watch the movie.

I would say...

first: the film, as it's more accessible, you can have a very good idea of the landscape within which this story and the history develops. After all the direct impact of this landscape, architecture, costuming and the physicality of the actors are very engaging. This is such a visual film it is actually hard to imagine it was a book.

second: read the book, then you'll be amazed that the film is indeed a very faithful adaptation, when it looks so purely cinematic. There are also certain cultural and political background which are more elaborated. You also get to know the death of the Prince of Salina, and the clear decomposition of that social class (the film only takes the first half of the book).

third: watch the film again, then you'll probably see how the film is actually VERY different from the book, though staying very close to the characters and events, dialogues of the book. Now one can grasp what Visocnti was really doing with this story. What may have seemed to our eyes at the first glance a gorgeous nostalgia (which was for Lampedusa, his book is basically a colorful nostalgia filled with grudges, overwhelmed with pessimism) is actually also a very severe critical film about the failures and shortcomings of the Italian reunification, reflecting Visconti's complex and contradictory personality, being from the same class as Lampedusa, but from the wealthier northern Italy, he himself being a confirmed communist, making so many films about the working classes' realities before this.

For instance the notion of class struggles, with the decaying aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, while the working class peasants somewhat left behind is much more clearly outlined in the film, with severe criticism. The reunification as the film shows is in reality more or less the north invading and then exploiting the poorer south, and the cruel savage nature of that politics is indeed very effectively visualized. The false facade of the political glories, the election scenes (possibly the most severely critical sequence in the film).

And the bitterness as well as the wisdom--the Prince is actually a much wiser and profound person in the film than in the book, with more subtle nuances of intelligence. He is much more lucid, and more conscious that he is the last of his breed--my guess is that in many ways the Prince Don Fabrizio became an autobiographical character for Visconti, possibly the most autobiographical. And the theme of aging has also become a very important part of the film--aging, with the strong consciousness that one is the last one of his own breed, the kind of man who will be extinct soon--Luchino Visconti too was the last of the Visconti de Modrone clan of Milan, and at that point of his career he must have been very conscious that with him the grand cultural tradition his family represented was coming to an end; with neither himself nor sister having children, his generation was literally the last of a great aristocracy.

Lampedusa's nephew jokes that "My uncle wrote the book from the side of the losers, while Luchino made his film from the side of the winner." This joke, I think, summarize very well what Visconti did on this masterpiece of his (really the greatest achievement in his entire career). While for Lampedusa it was the grudges on what they lost, for Luchino it was the guilt complex.

The communist aristocrat, the severe socially conscious realist and one of the most extravagant opulent stylistic formalist, a convinced fighter for democracy and human freedom who was an awfully megalomaniac dictator on the set, in private life a homosexual who nevertheless among the best directors of women in film history, Visconti was a very contradictory figure, and Il Gattopardo is perhaps the film that represents his complexity the best.

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