Curzio Malaparte – författare

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.

This is the first unexpurgated English edition of Curzio Malaparte’s legendary work The Skin. The book begins in 1943, with Allied forces cementing their grip on the devastated city of Naples. The sometime Fascist and ever-resourceful Curzio Malaparte is working with the Americans as a liaison officer. He looks after Colonel Jack Hamilton, “a Christian gentleman . . . an American in the noblest sense of the word,” who speaks French and cites the classics and holds his nose as the two men tour the squalid streets of a city in ruins where liberation is only another word for desperation. Veterans of the disbanded Italian army beg for work. A rare specimen from the city’s famous aquarium is served up at a ceremonial dinner for high Allied officers. Prostitution is rampant. The smell of death is everywhere.Subtle, cynical, evasive, manipulative, unnerving, always astonishing, Malaparte is a supreme artist of the unreliable, both the product and the prophet of a world gone rotten to the core.

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.

Experience postwar Europe through the diary of a fascinating and witty twentieth-century writer and artist. Recording his travels in France and Switzerland, Curzio Malaparte encounters famous figures such as Cocteau and Camus and captures the fraught, restless spirit of Paris after the trauma of war. In 1947 Curzio Malaparte returned to Paris for the first time in fourteen years. In between, he had been condemned by Mussolini to five years in exile and, on release, repeatedly imprisoned. In his intervals of freedom, he had been dispatched as a journalist to the Eastern Front, and though many of his reports from the bloodlands of Poland and Ukraine were censored, his experiences there became the basis for his unclassifiable postwar masterpiece and international bestseller, Kaputt. Now, returning to the one country that had always treated him well, the one country he had always loved, he was something of a star, albeit one that shines with a dusky and disturbing light.  The journal he kept while in Paris records a range of meetings with remarkable people—Jean Cocteau and a dourly unwelcoming Albert Camus among them—and is full of Malaparte’s characteristically barbed reflections on the temper of the time. It is a perfect model of ambiguous reserve as well as humorous self-exposure. There is, for example, Malaparte’s curious custom of sitting out at night and barking along with the neighborhood dogs—dogs, after all, were his only friends when in exile. The French find it puzzling, to say the least; when it comes to Switzerland, it is grounds for prosecution!

Neapel, 1943: Den Krieg gegen die Alliierten haben die Italiener verloren; nun kämpfen sie mit ihnen gegen die Deutschen. Doch mit den Befreiern breitet sich ein neues Übel in der Stadt aus: Es sind die Tage der Pest, so nennt Curzio Malaparte es gleich im ersten Satz dieses Romans, der vom Vatikan auf den Index gesetzt wurde und seinen Verfasser weltberühmt machte. Der Protagonist namens Malaparte, Verbindungsoffizier bei den Alliierten, begibt sich auf eine Odyssee durch ein zerstörtes Italien, dessen Bewohner in Elend und Chaos leben. Zwischen den Trümmern, unter denen Tote begraben liegen, verkaufen Frauen wie Männer ihre Körper und die spendablen GIs an ihre Landsleute, finden sich die alliierten Soldaten wieder «in einem geheimnisvollen Land, wo offenbar nicht die Vernunft, nicht das Bewusstsein, sondern unterirdische dunkle Kräfte die Menschen und die Dinge ihres Lebens steuerten». Und dann bricht in der mythischen Landschaft Kampaniens der Vesuv aus …Fäulnis und Zerstörung malt dieser epochale Roman in Bildern voll unvergesslicher Schönheit. Und in unserer friedensfernen Gegenwart ist er so aktuell wie bei seinem Erscheinen.

Curzio Malabat was an Italian playright,journalist,and diplomat and gained worldwide fame for his representive works "e;Kaputt"e;(1944)and "e;La peure"e;(1949).His life was very legendary, for he was born in 1898,lived through two world wars and was jailed twice for dissent. He is an Italian of German descent. Before the second world war, he was the editor of la gazeta in Milan. His friendship with count chiano, Mussolini's son-in-law, gave him access to Italian high society and many European dignitaries. His political opposition to the Italian fascist government, coupled with his special status, enabled him to write a work that awakened the human conscience with dark poetry. Skin was published in 1949 and adapted into a film of the same name in 1981. Novel in world war ii allied forces landed in Sicily, Italy, the liberation of Italy as the background, describes the heroine as the liaison officer saw and heard in Naples, depict the elegantly war under the background of Italy civilians, U.S. military officer, vivid picture of European high society nobility, highlights the many facets of the human nature, showing the post-war Europe's state of mind.