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"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 Celine, 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.
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.
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