Curzio Malaparte

Curzio Malaparte was a disaffected supporter of Mussolini with a taste for danger and high living. Sent by an Italian paper during World War II to cover the fighting on the Eastern Front, Malaparte secretly wrote this terrifying report from the abyss, which became an international bestseller when it was published after the war. Telling of the siege of Leningrad, of glittering dinner parties with Nazi leaders, and of trains disgorging bodies in war-devastated Romania, Malaparte paints a picture of humanity at its most depraved. Kaputt is an insider's dispatch from the world of the enemy that is as hypnotically fascinating as it is disturbing.

Kaputt

David Moore (Translator)

“It is a shameful thing to win a war.” The reliably unorthodox Curzio Malaparte’s own service as an Italian liaison officer with the Allies during the invasion of Italy was the basis for this searing and surreal novel, in which the contradictions inherent in any attempt to simultaneously conquer and liberate a people beset the triumphant but ingenuous American forces as they make their way up the peninsula. Malaparte’s account begins in occupied Naples, where veterans of the disbanded and humiliated Italian army beg for work, and ceremonial dinners for high Allied officers or important politicians feature the last remaining sea creatures in the city’s famous aquarium. He leads the American Fifth Army along the Via Appia Antica into Rome, where the celebrations of a vast, joy-maddened crowd are only temporarily interrupted when one well-wisher slips beneath the tread of a Sherman tank. As the Allied advance continues north to Florence and Milan, the civil war intensifies, provoking in the author equal abhorrence for killing fellow Italians and for the “heroes of tomorrow,” those who will come out of hiding to shout “Long live liberty” as soon as the Germans are chased away. Like Céline, another anarchic satirist and disillusioned veteran of two world wars, Malaparte paints his compatriots as in a fun-house mirror that yet speaks the truth, creating terrifying, grotesque, and often darkly comic scenes that will not soon be forgotten. Unlike the French writer however, he does so in the characteristically sophisticated, lush, yet unsentimental prose that was as responsible for his fame as was his surprising political trajectory. The Skin was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

The Skin

Can Pazari

La pelle

In The Skin, Curzio Malaparte extends the great fresco of European society he began in Kaputt. There the scene was Eastern Europe, here it is Italy during the years from 1943 to 1945; instead of Germans, the invaders are the American armed forces. In all the literature that derives from the Second World War, there is no other book that so brilliantly or so woundingly presents triumphant American innocence against the background of the European experience of destruction and moral collapse.

Pelle

A perverse and delicious tell-all view of the Soviet elite in the 1920s. Perhaps only the impeccably perverse imagination of Curzio Malaparte could have conceived of The Kremlin Ball, which might be described as Proust in the corridors of Soviet power. Malaparte began this impertinent portrait of Russia's Marxist aristocracy while he was working on The Skin, his story of American-occupied Naples, and after publishing Kaputt, his depiction of Europe in the hands of the Axis, thinking of this book as a another "picture of the truth" and a third panel in a great composition depicting the decadence of twentieth-century Europe. The book is set at the end of the 1920s, when the great terror may have been nothing more than a twinkle in Stalin's eye, but when the revolution was accompanied by a growing sense of doom. In Malaparte's vision it is from his nightly opera box, rather than the Kremlin, that Stalin surveys Soviet high society, its scandals and amours and intrigues among beauties and bureaucrats, including legendary ballerina Marina Semyonova and Olga Kameneva, sister of the exiled Trotsky, who though a powerful politician is so consumed by dread that everywhere she goes she gives off a smell of rotting meat. Unfinished at the time of Malaparte's death, this extraordinary court chronicle of Communist life (for which Malaparte also contemplated the title God is a Killer) was only published posthumously in Italy over fifty years after Malaparte's death and appears in English now for the first time ever.

The Kremlin Ball

"Every "diary" is a portrait, chronicle, tale, record, history. Notes taken day by day are not a diary but merely moments selected at random in the current of time, in the river of the passing day. A "diary" is a tale: the tale of a tranche de vie (the very definition of the novel, according to one celebrated school), of a period, a year, many years of our life. And as life follows the logic of a tale, it has a beginning, middle, and end (a life is a series of beginnings, middles, and ends, within the closed circle of the beginning, middle, and end of life, in the circle of life). It's not true that a "diary" begins by chance, progresses by chance, has no conclusion but the end of life. A diary, like every tale, calls for a beginning, a plot, and a denouement. The subject of Diary of a Foreigner in Paris is my return to Paris after a fourteen-year absence. It's my discovery of a new France, of a new French people. It's the portrait of a moment in the history of the French nation, of French civilization, that coincides with a particular moment in my life, in the story of my life. I don't claim to be breaking new ground in the "diary" genre. I'm simply suggesting that a diary is a tale, as a play is a tale. And now I arrive at my point: a "diary" is a theatrical work brought to the boards of the page. It's the point at which a tale comes closest to the theater. Everything there tends toward an ending, a conclusion, following the classical rules of unity, but centered on the character called "I." It's the Das Da, Kafka's "present moment," brought to the stage-page. My "diary," at least, is this."--

Diary of a Foreigner in Paris

Pūst

Un homme mort est un homme mort. Il n'est qu'un homme mort. Il est plus, et peut-être aussi moins, qu'un chien ou qu'un chat mort. En 1943, Curzio Malaparte, grand correspondant de guerre et officier de liaison auprès des Alliés, se trouve à Naples avec les troupes américaines venues libérer le pays. Entouré de ces hommes fraîchement débarqués en Europe, que les années de combat et de désillusion n'ont pas encore abîmés, l'auteur entreprend une tragique odyssée à travers une Italie en ruine, livrée à la misère et au chaos. Partout on se livre aux plus viles exactions. Comme un écho au tumulte des hommes, le Vésuve entre en éruption, les animaux meurent au supplice, la terre se déchire. De page en page, la complexité de ces destins happés par la brutalité de l'Histoire se déploie sous l'œil de l'auteur, intransigeant jusqu'à l'écœurement avec la cruauté des faits. Et c'est là la force de son récit : outre la beauté de son style, c'est sa capacité à s'indigner et à indigner le monde qui demeure remarquable. Curzio Malaparte poursuit avec La Peau sa magistrale entreprise de témoignage sur la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

La peau

The Italian journalist and novelist Curzio Malaparte had the extraordinary distinction of being the only war correspondent on the Eastern front who was actually permitted to travel to the front. His record of the war is therefore an account that is unique and utterly personal. Expelled from the southern part of the war zone on the orders of Goebbels, he was sent back by Mussolini in January 1942 to cover events in Finland, where the Germans had little control. From there he observed the siege of Leningrad. This is the writing of a man who knew and travelled in Russia extensively; a man with an astonishing eye for detail and a man of humanity and compassion. His account of the war does not trace the grand strategies, the great breakthroughs and clashes, but concentrates on individuals and little incidents: Ukrainian peasants eagerly rebuilding their church as the Red Army flees; Soviet soldiers listening, even as they fight, to the speeches of Stalin played endlessly on an old gramophone; aristocrats serving tea amidst the chaos of war; Finnish skiers silently flitting amongst the huge Soviet battleships frozen in the ice of Kronstadt. The result is a unique and moving testimony of the most terrible struggle of the twentieth century.

The Volga Rises in Europe

Hükümet devirme tekniği

Diario de un extranjero en París

Após cobrir batalhas das forças do Eixo na Segunda Guerra Mundial, Curzio Malaparte publicou Kaputt, que rapidamente se tornou um best-seller internacional. Em um misto de romance e reportagem, ele constrói um retrato incômodo e vívido da insanidade que é a guerra. Esta edição traz prefácio inédito de Lucia Wataghin. Em junho de 1941, Curzio Malaparte seguiu para a Ucrânia como correspondente de um jornal italiano, transitando entre as tropas germânicas e russas e cobrindo as batalhas das forças do Eixo na Suécia, Polônia, Romênia, Finlândia, Alemanha, a antiga Iugoslávia, Rússia e Ucrânia. Sua jornada por cidades e vilas arrasadas, presenciando a fome, o terror e a degradação da população, deram origem a Kaputt. O livro logo se tornou um clássico da literatura universal, sendo traduzido para vários idiomas e inspirando filmes e obras de arte. Kaputt impressiona pelas imagens que evoca com histórias que se entranham em nossa memória para nunca mais sair — o cônsul da Itália em Jassy, soterrado pelo peso frio de quase duzentos cadáveres de judeus que iam deportados num trem para a Romênia; ou as crianças napolitanas convencidas pelos pais de que aviadores ingleses sobrevoavam a cidade para atirar-lhes bonecas, cavalinhos de madeira e doces. Através dessas imagens, Malaparte desvela a impiedade e truculência do nazifascismo, a impotência e alienação da elite europeia e o horror vivido pelos mais oprimidos. " Kaputt é um livro triste, surpreendente, terrível e lírico. Mostra-nos os resultados do fanatismo ideológico, do racismo, dos valores distorcidos mascarados de pureza espiritual e do ódio à vida nos seus aspectos mais íntimos e vergonhosos. É essencial para qualquer compreensão humana da Segunda Guerra Mundial." — Margaret Atwood "As histórias grotescamente barrocas de Malaparte não precisam ser verdadeiras, pois retratam com exatidão os horrores e absurdos da guerra." — The Times "Parte autobiografia, parte ficção, Kaputt captura uma história aparentemente insondável. Nenhuma obra revelou mais sobre a combinação assassina de zelo e indiferença que caracteriza o fanatismo. Mítico e ao mesmo tempo totalmente humano, Kaputt assombrará o leitor para sempre." — The Wall Street Journal

Kırılmış, paramparça, mahvolmuş... Kaputt, Almancada tam olarak bu anlamlara geliyor. İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası Avrupa’sının o enkaz hali daha başka hangi sözcükle anlatılabilir ki? Malaparte, yazıldığı günden bugüne kadar çok konuşulan başyapıtını, 1941 yazında, Almanların Rusya’ya açtıkları savaşın başında, Ukrayna’da bir köylünün evinde yazmaya başlamış. Yalnızca cephelerdeki değil, cephe gerisindeki vahşeti de cümleleriyle okurun beynine kazıyan Malaparte, sayfalar boyunca bombardımanların altında, karla kaplı ormanların derinliklerinde, Nazi liderleriyle yapılan yemekli partilerde dolaşıyor. Avrupa uluslarının yazgılarının en zalim haliyle nasıl çizildiğini okura keskin bir dille anlatıyor. Kaputt’un okura ulaşabilmesinin ilginç bir öyküsü var; bu yolculuk boyunca Malaparte’nin elyazmalarını paltosunun astarına dikili olarak taşıması. Tıpkı okurun bir kere okuduktan sonra, bu kitabın ruhunu yüreğine dikili olarak taşıyacağı gibi... “Orospuluk etmek şimdilerde İtalya’da pek revaçta. Herkes orospuluk ediyor, Papa da, Kral da, Mussolini de, sevgili prenslerimiz de, kardinaller de, generaller de, hepsinin yaptığı orospuluk işte. İtalya’da hep öyle olmuştu, hep öyle olacak. Ben de orospuluk ettim, hem de yıllar yılı, bütün diğerleri gibi. Derken o hayattan iğrendim, isyan bayrağını açtım, soluğu hapiste aldım. Ama soluğu hapiste almak da orospuluk etmenin bir biçimi. Kahramanlık taslamak da, özgürlük için savaşım vermek de orospuluk etmenin bir biçimi İtalya’da. Kurtuluş yok...”

The Technique of Revolution

Coup D'etat

Edda Ronchi Suckert

Malaparte: 1950-1951

Text from Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte. [Translated from the Italian by Cesare Foligno.] Edited and compiled by Tomi Ungerer

Nicht wahr?...

Experiences of the author while serving as Italian liason officer with the 5th Army.

Curzio Malaparte

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