Customer Reviews

Kaputt (Northwestern Univ Pr) (European Classics)

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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.

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.

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.

This book was published in 1944 in Italy and in English in 1946. It covers events the author claimed to have observed in 1941-43, presented in seemingly random order, while he served as a war correspondent for a major Italian newspaper, accompanying the German army on the Eastern Front.

Malaparte (1898-1957) was an early member of the Fascist Party in Italy. A man of letters without political influence, he was expelled in the early 1930s and spent some years in internal exile. Between 1938 and 1943, he was arrested several times and imprisoned briefly in Rome. Still, his party connections, earlier diplomatic experience and status as a writer of note enabled him to work from 1941 on the Eastern Front for the Corriere della Sera. He's been called an enigma, contrary, opportunistic, a political chameleon who changed allegiances several times in the course of his life.

His book began abruptly in Sweden, with no background or context, but after a chapter or two his method became clearer. Most of the chapters were devoted to highlighting one or two locations and powerful images that supported the picture of barbarism he was trying to convey. The Leningrad Front ca. 1942 and frozen enemy soldiers used as traffic sentries. The Ukraine in summer 1941 and a foal born from a dying horse. Finland in April 1943, a frozen lake full of dead animals, and a dream of a crucified horse. Krakow in 1943 and a dinner with Hans Frank, the governor-general of conquered Poland. A banquet in Warsaw in February 1942 with German leaders, contrasted with the desperate conditions he observed in the Warsaw Ghetto. A pogrom in Jassy, Romania in June 1941, and so on.

His descriptions showed the German leaders blinded by their racist ideology, capable of playing Chopin with feeling in an afternoon and shooting at a child hours later. And a Balkan leader expressing his love for his homeland and detailing a high-minded political program while keeping body parts of enemies on his desk.

Initially, Malaparte alternated his description of horrors with memories of better days in prewar times, spent in Paris, Capri and elsewhere with cultured friends from many countries of Europe, and with friends in the diplomatic corps of Spain and Sweden during peaceful interludes in wartime Scandinavia. His description of the culture and civilization shared by upper-class friends from many nations was contrasted implicitly with the breakdown of values observed nearly everywhere during the war.

There were many interesting passages, such as when the German governor-general discussed his policy in Poland toward the church, aristocracy, middle class and workers. Moving passages, as when Malaparte observed the Poles' veneration of the Czestochowa Madonna. And terrible ones, as when he and others searched the countryside for an injured Jewish man who'd been taken away during a pogrom. The description of this pogrom must be one of the very early appearances in literature of the Holocaust.

In contrast to some other readers on Amazon, I felt that Malaparte did express shock and outrage about many of the events he experienced. His feelings were demonstrated, for example, in his remarks to the police chief in Jassy, his admiration expressed for another who denounced the chief, his joining the search to help find a victim, his compassion for girls kept in a brothel, and his frequent mockery and sarcasm in reported conversation with the Germans.

In the book's first half, as the gruesome events and images accumulated, cataloging the cruelty, suffering and betrayal of human values, they brought to mind the darkest paintings of Bruegel or Bosch, depicting the triumph of death or the chaos of hell. Here, the book was capable of searing images into the brain. For me, the most forceful example of this kind of writing was found about halfway through, in a chapter titled "Cricket in Poland," which contrasted a banquet of German leaders in Warsaw with the brutal expression of their thinking in a Romanian village.

The chilling atmosphere and focus weren't sustained. Many of the later chapters were devoted mainly to describing long drinking bouts during stopovers in wartime Finland and Sweden, and recording aimless conversation and gossip at parties in wartime Germany and Rome. He was showing the morally indifferent, pleasure-seeking members of the smart set back home who were well insulated from the war and concerned only with who was in and out of favor, and maybe the reality of alternating wartime horror and civilian boredom. But for me, this could've been described at greatly reduced length and with a far more balanced sense of proportion.

The book concluded with absurd situations such as a general's hunt for the last salmon in Lappland and minute analyses of the qualities of Mussolini's son-in-law and various others in Italian society. By the end, I was left with the feeling that the book was grossly uneven, written by a man who gave equal weight to the terrors of war and the table talk of the upper class in wartime, a man with a descriptive gift who lacked a sustained sense of moral outrage.

Yes, it's overwritten. Yes, One becomes impatient with its often flowery prose (translated from the Italian). And no, it's impossible to tell what's true and what's fiction.

I first read "Kaputt" when I was about 12 years old and accepted it as journalism. Later, I was surprised to find it described as a novel. Whatever it is, it's a masterpiece.

Italian journalist Malaparte, who converted from fascism to a kind of quasi-socialism (despite what some might think, he was never a communist and eventually became a devout Catholic), served time in an Italian prison for his dangerously critical writing about Mussolini. He was freed through the intervention of the italian foreign minister, Count Ciano, who was Mussolini's son-in-law and who was himself later shot by Mussolini for treason.

Sounds interesting already, eh? Malaparte gives us supposedly first-hand accounts, while working as a war correspondent in the uniform of an Italian captain, of his experiences in the drawing rooms of fascist officials; at the Leningrad front and the Warsaw Ghetto; and at the sites of massacres of Jews, gypsies, and intellectuals.

He writes in two complementary styles. His ironic, laid-back style accentuates the horror of the nazis' matter-of-fact attitude about the atrocities they committed. His lyrical style paints word-pictures of his impressions of the sights and sounds of the towns and fields of old Europe.

The result is an almost exhaustingly epic depiction of the destruction of European culture from the unique perspective of one who mingled with many of those responsible. Be patient with the book when you start it. It grows on you.

As is stated in the Hofstadter's Afterword, in my edition, Malaparte's writing is "....haunted by the desire to have been Proust." For anyone who has read Proust, this is clear from the title of the first chapter of the work, "Du Cote de Guuermantes". But of course, Malaparte is no Proust. No writer in all of literature is. Further, the setting of the opus is not the dinner tables of the aristocracy or of the haute bourgeoisie, but battlefronts in Eastern Europe and the dinner tables of ruthless men at war-Nevertheless, Malaparte does manage to capture some of the Proustian effect in his camera-eye, vivid, detailed snapshots of this environment.

But-caveat lector-this environment is so loathsome, bestial and vile-as wars tend to be-that one is in danger in becoming, by absorbing one's self in this book, in losing any hope in or affection for humanity. From horseheads rising from the surface from the frozen over Lake Laguda (perhaps the most lasting image, because so beautiful and horrific at once), to the officer who keeps a jar of human eyeballs of the partisans he is fighting on his desk to, well, any number of ghastly scenes, it is impossible for the reader to come away from Malaparte's take on the war, unaffected (excepting, of course, "readers" who dismiss the book out of hand and leave it deliberately on the airplane as one reviewer admits to doing).-But, perhaps, this reviewer's reaction is understandable. None of us relish looking on the dark, bestial side of men and women who might well be ourselves, given different circumstances of time and place.

But what significantly marks this book apart from all other war writings is the unwillingness to overtly take sides. It sometimes seems that one is reading an account of an extraterrestrial who has visited Europe to give an account of human behaviour. You won't find any Neo-Nazi glorification here, but neither will you find any of the late Stephen Ambrose's "Greatest Generation" American triumphalism. This is what truly makes the work great and a must have for every literate human unafraid of the tableaux that war presents: This, seemingly at least, disinterested depiction of the behaviour of men at their worst-The only writer Malaparte resembles, really, is not Proust, but the German writer Ernst Junger, whose journals, alas, have not yet been translated into English.

Well, prospective reader, there's the gauntlet-pick it up, if you dare.

I have been reading literature for almost 50 years and have been teaching it for many, many years. In all of these years I have not found a novel more powerfully written about the horrors, absurdity, and perhaps sheer insanity of WWII and war in general.D M Thomas' Pictures at an Exhibition, among a few others, like Grosssman's Life and Fate, comes closest, however.

This is not to deny the power of Homer, Euripides, Tolstoy, Mailer, Vonnegut, et. al. They are all great. But the beauty of Malaparte's images, his enormous power of description, the depiction of our inhumanity to one another and the animal world--the title of each of his sections is an animal, Horses, Mice, etc.--is stunning. Much of his enormous imact is created by a profound sense of irony, as when one of the Black Guard, a nordic "angel" follows him through the Warsaw Ghetto, or the deer with the Nazi flag stuck in its back at a Nazi dinner party, falling under the carving knife of Malaparte's "gracious" hostess, for example.

This is a book that should be read slowly and thoughtfully.
Malaparte's literary talent will elate you even if the subject matter horrifies you--as it should.

This is one of those little-known books that deserves to be universally read and seriously thought about and discussed. Malaparte was one of the great writers of our century and it is wonderful to see his brilliant work back in print.

I am truly shocked at the reasons people have given Kaputt a negative review: too icy? too removed? too horrific? What are we talking about here, Disneyland or war?

I have read many, many novels, memoirs, and essays on World War II and never have I encountered anything quite like Malaparte's accounts. The problem with this book, if there is a problem to consider, is how beautifully Malaparte describes absolute horror. The honey-like flow of his writing fades in and out like one's breath in winter. A particular scene of frozen horses, as another reviewer pointed out, will leave you stunned and emotionally wounded. For some reason everything in the book has a cold, yellowless-blue tint, so particular to the North, which makes what's happening all the more chilling.

I will say I could not, was absolutely incapable of, finishing the book all at once. Even for those with strong stomachs, the book is nearly indigestible. I had to shut the book, more than once, and ask myself, how does one get so far and deep into darkness? It truly doesn't seem possible. Yet one walks away from the book thinking, "I could have been one of those people---on either side of the fence." It is this that probably most upsets readers of this book.

I highly recommend readers to browse the NYRB collection for brilliant literature.

Malaparte's Kaputt is a true heir to Voltaire's "Candide" and Scholvsky's "Sentimental Journey." All three works employ estrangement, emotional distance, irony, grotesque imagery and pointedly compromised narrators in order to engulf the reader in the horror of human evildoing.

In this, they are the opposite of Romantic fiction, which seeks to elevate the reader to the position of Hero, by identifying him/her with the values and actions of the "heroic" protagonist.

(A Schlovskian aside: Joseph Heller cribs most of the novelist style of "Catch 22" from these authors - and creates a whole new cloth.)

Romantic fiction makes good airport reading because the reader is set squarely against the villain. We are Frodo, not Sauron.

It's all very comforting and ultimately self-congratulatory. The Readers applauds the Protagonist's heroics which he/she imagines to be his/her own moral supremacy. ("If I was in Frodo's place, I'd act just like him" says the dear reader to himself.)

"Kaputt" is the opposite of this.

As the reader/protagonist, we are forced to comfront the inaction that was Europe's (and America's) in the face of the Nazi horrors. We are forced to associate with mass-murderers. We are forced to endure the shameless apologies about "German culture" and "minor flaws" which lead to genocide.

This is all very hard for a reader to endure.

We would rather hang out with Tom Hanks and Private Ryan.

But Malaparte's work serves a purpose - beyond what the author might have imagined:

As Schlovsky famously wrote in "Sentimental Journey", and I paraphrase, "If this [description of amputating a leg] disgusts you, then don't make war."

This is not a review but a suggestion as to your procedures in which to list a book.
When searches for a work in translation, it is almost impossible to find which translation is used in the particular publication. As you know, the quality and reputation among translations can be very different, and buyers know this and are well moved by the choices to be made. You almost never list the translatoars name. And you often do not even tell us it is a work that is translated, or if translated what the original language is. Consider the Italian novel Kaputt. For The NY Review Books Classics your entry shows no translator and the 'Product Details' lists the Language as English. In similar fashion, the European Classics version shows a translator's name but states the language as English. Is it burdensome to say: 'English translation from the Italian'? A few months ago, when searching for some editions for Russian novels, I was stymied by which did whose translation. If you pride yourself in being an important resource of record for books, you must address these matters and give buyers what they need to know.