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43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The everyday miseries of war, January 23, 2006
Curzio Malaparte is the pseudonym of Kurt Erich Suckert, born in South Tirol (part of Italy). As a reporter he travelled extensively through German-occupied Europe during the Second World War and did not shun the front lines. But he also had access to the "Big Names" of fascism, such as Himmler, Franck (the governor of Poland) and the son-in-law of Mussolini. But above all Malaparte remained an outsider with deviant opinions that landed him in Italian prisons a few times.
In a rather unemotional style (for most of the book) he describes the everyday horrors of war: sleeping in a house with a horse carcass rotting next to it, the upper ten of a city playing bridge while at the same time the Jews of their city are massacred. But also the dinner conversations at Governor Franck's place, in which the arrogance, absence of (self)reflection and total lack of humor of the other attendants are both stunning and revealing. And the 'beau monde' of Italy which is more concerned with the latest developments in the love life of Mussolini's son-in-law than with the fact that Italy is very obviously losing the war.
But Malaparte also describes the everyday miseries of war: a father who hides some small presents in his backyard so that his kids think in the morning that the English fighter planes were there to drop of presents rather than bomb the city to pieces. To me this was the most touching story in the book.
A well-written book with as a minor criticism that the story does not relly lead anywhere, but this is probably normal for an autobiography: real life very seldom leads to something.
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49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Different Type of War Novel, August 26, 2005
War novels generally fall into two categories: 1) bad historical fiction by war buffs obsessed with tactics and detailed information on vehicles and aircraft used therein; and 2) overly-simplified, obnoxiously-preachy narratives where deeper moral lessons are learned amongst the endless human suffering. That's why I find KAPUTT so fascinating. Malaparte is a nihilist, a true cynic, with the few compassionate sentiments he utters looking ridiculous next to his ambivalence and inaction. KAPUTT is a novel about an inherent destructive malaise, a novel full of contempt for humanity, for the ignorance and baseness that almost completely eradicated European civilization during the first half of the 20th Century. I haven't read this book in ten years and I still have that image of the horses in Lake Ladoga embedded in my mind, the description of the pogrom, the gelatinous eyes--truly haunting and unforgettable stuff. As the afterward says, Malaparte, due to his relative affluence, was able to drift between partisans and fascists with ease. No doubt many readers will fault him for this, for not standing up valiantly to defend the victims of Nazi/Fascisti oppression. Malaparte was content to describe, with a frighteningly-removed irony, the abhorrent madness of modern man. If you're interested in this-or-that pincer movement or how this unit fought valiantly in battle, this novel will bore you out of your skull. If on the other hand, however, you want to read about someone wandering about in the aftermath, sitting and ruminating beside the bloated corpses of horses and sleeping in empty, abandoned homes, KAPUTT is the war novel for you.
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44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A reality too real to touch, October 23, 2001
This review is from: Kaputt (Northwestern Univ Pr) (European Classics) (Paperback)
Curzio Malaparte was like me, an infantry officer and a journalist. He served in the ranks of the French Army in World War 1 and then as a war correspondent on the eastern front with the Germans, on the northern front with the Finns, and in Poland with the occupation authorities during world war 11. A man who acquired both culture and status by sheer force of personality he was the director of press at the fatal 'Peace' conference of Versailles in 1919, which half ended World War 1 and set the scene for World War 11. The book, as Walter Murch wrote in Zoetrope magazine in 1998 is a searing revelation not only of war and its manifest evil, but of something much more serious, that of the evil that apparently civilised men and women can do, when all restraints are lifted. There comes a time when the facts soar out of our reach, either of the imagination or of the mind, when they are too terrible to contemplate. I find this with the Holocaust. My mind simply refuses to grapple with the enormity of it, taken together with the enormity of the Russian losses, which always make me weep as I enter Moscow past the anti tank traps that are still there. In Kaputt I can feel Malaparte cringing from the horror, but at the same time determined to find some way to decscribe it. And I feel he succeeds. He does enable a person to confront the fact that it was a bunch of classical music lovers, led by Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, who created the Ghetto in order to "liberate the Jews". More than almost any other writer on World War 11, he gets under the skin of the Germans, and into the Nazi mind and perhaps even more so, into the mind of the anti semites of Roumania, Poland anD Russia, who made their own awful contribution to the Holocaust. Younger readers should not let the slightly dated style put them off. Here is the inner reality of war as it has seldom been described. Here is the Nazi mind as seldom seen. Here is the terrible truth of World War 11, made accessible (just) to those who did not directly experience it. And learn from the two most poignant scenes in the book; the one in which he fails to do anything about the Jews of Jassy, and the one in which he tries to get under the skin of Frank, a man in whom banality and evil fought for control and in which evil emerged triumphant and out of which 6 million Jews died. Few can have come so close to the ultimate malignancy and lived. But seldom has the effect of guilty and the burden of hoplessness been so well portrayed. A book for all time.
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