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Malaparte: A Biography

Malaparte: A Biography

by Maurizio Serra, translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley

$34.95
$34.95
Available as E-Book Biography & Memoir Italian Literature
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Curzio Suckert (1898-1957) —best known by his pen-name Malaparte—was not only a literary master but one of the mystery men of twentieth-century letters. The son of a cosmopolitan German businessman, his mother an Italian, Malaparte led a life that was intimately entwined from start to finish with the twentieth century's troubled history, and only recently has it become possible to begin to separate fact from the screen of fictions with which he continually surrounded himself.

Diplomat and novelist Maurizio Serra tells the story of a precocious child who hurried to enlist in the French Army and endured the horrors of trench warfare in World War I. Taking up the pen of the journalist in the interwar years, Malaparte both allied himself and fell out with Mussolini, writing his provocative bestseller The Technique of the Coup d'Etat to popularise the lessons of the Bolshevik revolution and the fascist March on Rome before being sent into exile in provincial Italy. During World War II, Malaparte reported from the Eastern Front, joined forces with the occupying Allies after Mussolini's fall, and secretly wrote the first of his two masterpieces, Kaputt, a record of wartime enormities and atrocities that is as stylish as it is hellish. With The Skin, a black comedy about the American Army in Naples, Malaparte cemented a reputation for daring and disturbing originality. A polymath and shapeshifter—fascist, communist, a converted Catholic on his deathbed—a self-mythologizer on the move between society salons, the corridors of power, and the frontlines, Malaparte is a complex and fascinating subject.

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681378701
Pages: 736
Publication Date:

Praise

To this day Malaparte defies easy categorization: Che Guevara and European neofascists alike read his political essays; American intelligence agents gave him a pass even as top Italian communists befriended him; and at the end of his life, briefly dazzled by Mao Zedong, he traveled to China to see yet another revolution in the works. In this ambitious corrective to Malaparte’s self-mythologizing, Serra writes that he was consistent in at least one way: “Malaparte does not take anyone’s side, never forgets his role as an observer and often as a voyeur, in a Proustian sense.”
Kirkus Reviews

Indeed the writer Malaparte was, or tried to be, numerous characters at the same time: soldier, displomat, trade unionist, man of action, politician, journalist, film director…, always, of course, in his own manner. That is why the task that Serra took on, that of writing several biographies at once of one and the same subject, was of almost insuperable difficulty. The fact that he has succeeded in it is due to Maurizio Serra’s being not only an elegant literary critic but also an established historian…. In Serra’s book, all of Malaparte’s lives are examined and effectively dissected one by one, but the author never loses sight of the man as an overall whole.
—Alberto Indelicato, Diogenes

An uncompromising biography.
—René de Ceccatty, Le Monde

[Serra’s] investigation delves into the multiple skins of the "chameleon" Malaparte, sorting out the mythomania and truths of an indefatigable provocateur, bard of the agonies of old Europe.
—Christophe Ono-dit-Biot, Le Point

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