The Professor and the Siren

“An enigmatic, tantalizing and haunting tale of rare beauty which glints like a finely cut diamond…it crackles with erotic tension.” —Joseph Farrell, The Times Literary Supplement

“Lampedusa has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive…. ‘The Professor and the Siren’ is an exquisite fantasy and a sustained one.”—E. M. Forster

“‘The Professor and the Siren’ seems to me a masterpiece.” —Edmund Wilson

“A work of outstanding laconic eccentricity….Lampedusa wrote two masterpieces and this is the other one.” —Nicholas Blincoe, The Telegraph
 
“[Lampedusa] comes so marvellously close to the people and scenes he describes because he conveys, in the manner of classical artists, the hard gleam of inaccessibility that makes human beings and nature itself seem final and alone.” —V. S. Pritchett
 
“After a long and thoughtful accumulation of time and passions, skirting the straits of history and politics, [Lampedusa] recreated an entire epoch, filling his pages with tapestries of crystalline and lasting beauty.” —Edna O’Brien, Financial Times