conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about Prince, Fabrizio, Salina with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Leopard'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Prince, Fabrizio, Salina with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.. Start with the sentence 'The Leopard (1963 film): Sicily, 1860'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Leopard (1963 film): Sicily, 1860.\nThe corpse of a Royalist soldier is found in the garden of the villa of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina (the gardener quips that these soldiers stink as much in death as they do in life).\nAs the Prince's large family enjoys the customary comforts and privileges of an ancient and noble name, including private services with their Jesuit priest, war has broken out between the King's army and the insurgent volunteer redshirts of Giuseppe Garibaldi.\nAmong the rebels is the Prince's remarkably handsome and dashing nephew, Tancredi, with whose romantic politics the Prince shares some whimsical sympathy (and a good deal of material support—Tancredi is a notorious spendthrift).\nMoved by the political uprising, the Prince departs, with his priest as cover, for a nearby town where he engages in an assignation with a local woman; he complains that, despite siring seven children upon his devout Catholic wife, he has yet to see her navel.\nGaribaldi's army conquers the city and Sicily from the Bourbons, but the mood is muted and the prospects murky.\nThe Prince muses upon the inevitability of change, with the middle class displacing the hereditary ruling class while on the surface everything remains the same.\nHis priest worries about the future of the church under the Garibaldini, but the Prince assures him that it is only his class who has anything to lose.\nRefusing to bend to the tide of necessity, the Prince departs from Palermo for his summer palace at Donnafugata.\nThe glamour of his name is still such as to lift roadblocks and allow passage to his family across disputed terrain.\nArriving in the hilltop town, the Prince establishes his life just as it was always lived—hunting, social visits, etc.\n—despite the fact that a new national assembly has called a plebiscite which (thanks to the corrupt zealotry of the town's leading citizen, the incorrigibly bourgeois Don Calogero Sedara), the nationalists win 512-0.\nSedara's grip on power and property in the region is matched only by his fawning sycophancy toward the Prince, whose incontestable nobility of character and ancestry leave Sedara looking distinctly plebeian.\nThe Prince learns from his hunting companion, the town organist, that Sedara's wife is never seen publicly, as Sedara jealously guards her rare loveliness; furthermore she is an illiterate peasant he keeps merely as a breeding stock.\nTheir only progeny, the exquisitely beautiful Angelica, on the other hand, Sedara clearly sees as a ticket of admittance to the high-class soirées of the nobility.\nBringing her with him to the villa of the Salinas, he watches as both the Prince and Tancredi fall abjectly in love with her.\nRealizing his chance, he effectively pimps his daughter to the aristocracy; and Tancredi, as the only unmarried eligible member of the clan, offers his hand.\nThis devastates the Prince's daughter, Concetta, who had formed a passionate attachment to her cousin, not unreasonably based on his florid demonstrations of affection; which he now forgoes in an instant.\nThe Prince sees the wisdom of the match, since he knows his nephew's vaulting ambition and need for ready cash, which Angelica's father, greedy for familial prestige, will happily make available.\nSo, with the mutual blessing of the Prince of Salina and Don Calogero, Tancredi and Angelica become engaged.\nDuring the lull after this notable event, a visitor from the constituent assembly comes to the villa, hoping for a private interview with the Prince.\nWhen his chance comes, he begs the great scholar and nobleman to join the senate and help direct the ship of state; particularly he hopes that the Prince's great compassion and wisdom will help alleviate the poverty and ignorance to be seen everywhere on the streets of Sicily.\nBut the Prince demurs and refuses this invitation, claiming that Sicily prefers its sleep to the agitations of modernity.\nHe sees a future when the leopards and the lions, along with the sheep and the jackals, will all live according to the same law, but he does not want to be a part of this democratic vision.\nHe notes that Tancredi has shifted allegiances from the insurgent Garibaldini to the King's army, and wistfully recognizes in his nephew the kind of opportunist and time-server who will flourish in the new Italy.\nA great ball is held at the villa of a neighbouring Prince, and the Salinas attend, along with a large troop from the King's army, and Tancredi, who uses this occasion to introduce his fiancée to society.\nAfflicted by a combination of melancholia, dyspepsia, and age, the Prince wanders forlornly from chamber to chamber, increasingly disaffected by the entire edifice of the society he so gallantly represents; until, at his nadir, Angelica approaches and asks him to dance.\nStirred and momentarily released from his cares, the great Prince accepts and for three minutes he is once more the elegant and dashing figure of his past, as he holds in his arms the inordinate beauty of the Italy to come, which he will never inhabit.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Leopard
  Gjendem stopped in front of his table with a cough. Bent Nordbø finished reading the last lines of an article about some Mexican immigrants' revitalization of a former condemned area of the Bronx, and glanced down at the page to make sure there was nothing else of interest. Then he removed his enormous glasses, snatched the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and looked up at the nervous, and still breathless, man standing by his table.
  Nordbø folded the newspaper. Gjendem had also been told that when the man opened it again you could take it that the conversation was over. Nordbø tilted his head and started the not-inconsiderable task of cleaning his glasses.
  Harry scrunched up his eyes at the sun flooding into his room. He had just woken up and spent the first seconds shaking off dreams and reconstructing reality.
  Afterward they had told him that what had frightened them most was being shot at while they were digging down to the chimney.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Bjørn Holm looked at the photo of Bellman, which had been uncovered when he had torn off the page in front. "Well, I'll be..."
  Mikael Bellman studied Sigurd Altman. He didn't like his cold eyes. Didn't like the bony body, the teeth pressing against the inside of his lips, the staccato movements or the clumsy lisp. But he didn't need to like Sigurd Altman to see him as his redeemer and benefactor. For every word Altman said, Bellman was a step nearer his triumph.
  Altman let slip a wry smile. "As you prefer. The story Harry told was astonishingly accurate, anyway. The problem with it is that it contains only one concrete piece of evidence. My fingerprints at Leike's. Well, let's say I was there. I was paying him a visit. And we talked about the good old days."
  Harry found the woodpile beneath a rock jutting out from the mountainside. It was covered by a green tarpaulin. An ax stood bowed in a chopping block, beside it a knife. Harry looked around and kicked the snow. Not much of interest here. His boot brushed something. An empty white plastic bag. He bent down. On it was a contents label. Thirty feet of gauze. What was that doing here?
  Harry angled his head and examined the chopping block for a few moments. Looked at the black blade in the wood. At the knife. At the handle. Yellow, smooth. What was a knife doing on a chopping block? Could be several reasons, of course, yet...
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: DON BARTLETT lives in Norfolk, England, and works as a freelance translator of Scandinavian literature. He has translated, or co-translated, Norwegian novels by Lars Saabye Christensen, Roy Jacobsen, Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Kjell Ola Dahl, Gunnar Staalesen and Pernille Rygg.