The truths of war according to Curzio Malaparte

The novels of a man whose convictions have wavered are often better than those of a man with dogmatically unwavering convictions. In dissent, in divided passion, in ambivalent or bifurcated commitments, literature grows more powerful and lucid than in absolute certainty and militancy.

Curzio Malaparte (Prato, 1898–Rome, 1957) was one of the most brilliant representatives of anti-dogmatic and contradictory literature. He was also one of the most unsettling and unsettling. During the first half of the 20th century, this type of literature boasted figures as illustrious and diverse from both a human and ideological perspective as George Orwell, Vassili Grossman, Arthur Koestler and our own Joan SalesThese are very different names, but they share a common thread: they believed with hope, yet in an unyieldingly personal way, in a cause—communism, fascism, anti-fascist republicanism—and were horribly disappointed. This seismic disillusionment led each of them, in their own way, to adopt a suspicious and critical attitude toward power.

The skin, one of Curzio Malaparte's two great novels along with KaputtIt cannot be read solely through the prism of its author's political and human disappointment, but it is evident that the apparent cynicism, the savage sarcasm, and the stupefied naturalization of immorality that oozes from many of its pages can only be read properly, that is, in a non-moralistic and non-judgmental way, if we understand the disappointment its author carried.

This is not about a strictly biographical reading of the novel, published in 1949. But from the moment the protagonist narrator is Malaparte himself and the novel gives direct testimony of the occupation or liberation of Italy by the Allies (1943), an event that he experienced as a liaison officer from Naples to Rome, it is clear that the writer's previous trajectory cannot be ignored.

Undisciplined, individualistic and revolutionary

The translator Anna Casassas, who has done a magnificent job, summarizes it in the presentation of this first Catalan edition of The skinMalaparte, the son of a German father and an Italian mother—his real name was Kurt Erich Suckert—fought in the Great War to defend Latin and Christian civilization (in the ranks of the French army against the German Empire). He was traumatized by what he witnessed and became a fascist in the 1920s. Considered too undisciplined, individualistic, and revolutionary by the conservative leadership of Mussolini's party, he was imprisoned and later exiled to the island of Lipari. However, thanks to his talent and prestige, when World War II broke out, he was mobilized by the Italian army as a war correspondent and accompanied Nazi troops on the Eastern Front as a star reporter.

Given this trajectory and Malaparte's ambiguous and fluctuating personality, it is not surprising that The skin It is—successively, chapter by chapter, sometimes all at once—the work of a fascist in disguise, the work of a communist who adores and defends the working class, the work of a believer with an almost Paleochristian sense of faith, the work of a loyal but disillusioned patriot, the work of a dissenter who detests malicious pro-Americans, the work of a pro-European aesthete, the work of a nihilist who sees only misfortune and horror, the work of a vitalist full of compassion. Few novelists are capable of transforming a soldier's agony into a precious moment, of portraying the depravity of child prostitution with such lightness, of understanding the human instinct for survival with such raw empathy, and of reflecting with such clarity on the nature of totalitarianism.

I said the work and not the novel because The skin It is not structured around a beginning, middle, and end, which is the classic narrative formula, but rather like a long report. That is to say, it presents us with a setting—Italy invaded by American troops—and, scene by scene, we discover what situations unfold and which characters inhabit it. The skin He is a precursor to the non-fiction novel and Malaparte, a father of New Journalism.

Beyond the relevance of the historical events it records, what makes The skin In a literary work of the first magnitude, it is the way Malaparte captures and expresses everything. His voice—his style, his tone—is so versatile and presents as many registers as the faces of the reality he describes. Prophetic, humanist, tender, thorny, immoral, symbolic, funny, poetic, ruthless, apocalyptic, Genesis-like, passionate, skeptical, cruel: Curzio Malaparte wrote a book that is like war, like life, like the world. Extraordinary.