Curzio Malaparte's Shock Tactics

Summary

“You’re a born Fascist, one of the authentic ones,” the Italian writer Piero Gobetti wrote to his friend Curzio Malaparte in 1925, three years into Mussolini’s dictatorship. Gobetti, twenty-four and hailed as the most brilliant liberal writer of his generation, hoped to prevent Malaparte, then twenty-seven, from throwing all his talent behind the Fascist cause. “Don’t you understand that you’re wasting time, that the Fascists are playing you, that in the party you’re a fifth-class man, that your writings for the past year haven’t been worth a damn?” he wrote. Gobetti died the next year, from injuries inflicted by Black Shirts. Malaparte, by then, was making his name as one of Mussolini’s highbrow henchmen. During the Second World War, he became the regime’s star foreign correspondent, mobilizing the techniques of surrealism to evoke the era’s savagery. Malaparte rode to the Eastern Front with the Wehrmacht and toured the Warsaw ghetto with Nazi commanders and their wives. A fabulist whose medium was reality, he assembled his impressions into a nightmarish triptych—“The Volga Rises in Europe,” “Kaputt,” and “The Skin”—which forms the basis of his reputation today. With their uncanny sang-froid, their suave delight in ripping off the skin of experience, they leave no reader unmarked.Malaparte writes about spilled guts of civilization, but in the manner less of a medic rushing to the scene than of a connoisseur savoring a spectacle. His waltz through the twentieth century combined an unabashed taste for strongmen with a keen interest in history’s losers. Malaparte himself was exacting in matters great and small. A puritan who abstained from coffee, bread, and spirits and watered down his Chianti, he spent three hours on his morning routine—which included shaving his chest and the backs of his hands and greasing his jet-black hair into place. In the late thirties, he bought a plot of land on a cliff on Capri and worked with a local mason to build a bunker-like house tha...