Senior Service: A Story of Riches, Revolution and Violent Death

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was the most glamorous international publisher of his generation, yet he died violently, as a member of an ultra-left group attempting to blow up an electricity pylon. He had been living underground for two years, communicating only by letter with his son, the author of this book. Born to enormous wealth, he was a torn character, equally attracted to great books and revolutionary politics. The publishing house he founded became legendary for its radical interventions, and yet Feltrinelli sponsored two great post-war novels - Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago and The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa - that were nostalgic for vanished ways of life. Despite the KGB, Pasternak smuggled his manuscript to Feltrinelli out of the USSR, and the editor's correspondence with the besieged writer, never before published, is one of the finest passages in this fine book. As a result the publisher broke with the Italian Communist Party, but only to its left, towards Castro and dreams of partisan war. Feltrinelli seemed to have a life of enviable ease and fulfilment. Why did he end so badly? His son has written an exploratory biography of his father, and through his life the story of one of Italy's great capitalist dynasties, a brilliant meditation on the lure of revolution and an intriguing study of post-war culture.