Customer Reviews

The Skin

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This is not an easy book, and it is not a book for everybody. In fact, if you believe in the manifest destiny of your country or are used to dividing people between winners and losers, save your time and do not buy this book because you would not understand it.

Malaparte's book is a series of autobiographic episodes set in WW2 Italy. It shows the despair and degradation of a place where everything, everything is for sale and the only thing that matters is your skin, saving your skin and living another day. In many respects, however, Italy becomes a metaphor for the whole of Europe (watch the movie "Berlin - year 0") in those times, and perhaps mankind. In fact, Malaparte's language is often poetic and his book transcends his times to become a universal portrait of suffering man. It is the suffering, defeated man that Malaparte takes pity of, while describing man in his hour of triumph as "unbearable".

Among all the rhetoric on the Liberation and the magnificent new future that awaited Europe after the war, here is a writer who preferred to set his eyes on a painful present. Malaparte gives us a description of a terrible time which has the same timeless value as Thucidides' account of the plague in Athens.

A particularly enjoyable part of the book is the description of the contact between the Old and the New World. Malaparte, an officer of the Italian Corps that fought alongside the Allies in the Italian campaign from 1943 onwards, was very good friend with some American officers and knew General Clark. He has left us a wonderful description of the mixed feelings of the US troops in experiencing, often for the first time, the reality of Europe, of their obscure fascination and, at the same time, contempt for "corrupt" Europe, of their genuine innocence mixed with a presumption of moral superiority. In an unforgettable dialogue, an American woman serving in the auxiliary forces contemptiously asks Malaparte how can women in Naples prostitute themselves for a packet of cigarettes, clearly they must be putting their habit ahead of their honor. Malaparte drily answers that "With a packet of cigarettes, they can buy 3 kgs of bread"...

"The Skin" is a complex and fascinating book.

Ostensibly it is about the American army arriving in Italy during WWII and coming into contact (often for the first time) with Europe's spiritual and moral corruption and degradation. The idea was copied a (little) bit by Joseph Heller in Catch-22. If you've read Catch-22, you have SOME an idea about what to expect.

But "The Skin" is a deeper book than Catch-22, and Malaparte was much more interested in the differences between the decadence of the old world and the brash, conquering innocence of the New World, where things such as defeat are considered physically and morally impossible. Defeat is actually seen as morally reprehensible and somehow or other, the fault of the defeated.

Unlike Heller, Malaparte never portrays the military or the politicians as out and out bufoons: he realizes that people are invariably more complex than that.

It is a rare combination of intellectual writing, combined with moments of vibrantly dark humour. An example: when an American liason officer speaks about Italian women selling their bodies, Malaparte replies that all that they are actually selling is their hunger. And that it'd be a marvellous thing if every American soldier could take home a piece of hunger to show his wife what amazing things you can buy for money.

The title, by the way, refers to Malaparte's comment that once flags have been proven worthless and shamed, the only flag people are willing to fight for is that of their own skin. The indomitable spirit of mankind is shown to be a greedy, grasping thing that will stop at nothing in order to continue existing. And the spectacle is anything but edifying.

I don't know this translation but "The Skin" is one of the most powerful books that I have ever read. Ostensibly a portrait of Naples following the city's liberation by the allied forces in 1943, it in fact provides a view of the state of Europe before, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than a constructed narrative, it's a series of episodes set in war-time Naples or on the Russian Front where Malaparte witnessed the horrors committed by the Nazis (one particularly terrifying episode set in a Russian forest at night will haunt me for a long while). There are also lighter moments (such as the blackly comic dinner for American officers when the last surviving fish of the Naples aquarium is served on a bed of coral) but the one thing that comes to the fore throughout is the sheer power of the survival spirit, the lengths that human beings will go to save their skin. Malaparte's magnificently poetic language makes this one of the classics of the 20th century.

This is an intense and vivid account of Malaparte's experiences in his native Italy during the American occupation. Set largely in Naples, it picks up where his masterpiece Kaputt left off, and nearly attains the haunting, hallucinogenic power and bitter humor of his earlier work.

'The Skin' is tainted, however, by a deep misanthropy that permeates the work, and which was perhaps latent in Kaputt but seemed more justified when directed against the Nazis and other Fascists he encountered than against his countrymen. This misanthropy is voiced explicitly on a few occasions, but most venomously expressed in his racist, homophobic, and red-baiting descriptions of black American soldiers and upper class gays, respectively. So the hopeful, humanist note on which he ended Kaputt decays sourly as he recounts his experience in the ruins of Naples following the Allied landing.

Translator David Moore doesn't attain the fluid clarity of Foligno's English rendering of Kaputt, and he irritatingly refuses to translate the French and German conversations that appear throughout the book. His rendering of Florentine street idiom in Cockney accents is a poor choice.

Overall, not the equal of Kaputt, but still a memorable book.

This is one of the better written books I've ever read. In fact, I've read it three times and each time I was suprised by its superb irony, excellent dialogues and lyric style. Reading it, I used to think I was reading again Dante's Comedia, but written in 1943 and sewed to our material earth and humanity, instead to Heaven or Hell.

Now that the world is at war again, may be we should read again this book...

Malaparte's "The Skin" is more than a sardonic look at the American occupation of Italy in WWII. It's a hilarious, and very sad, look at the human condition -- how low humanity can fall and how fatalistic and depraved we can become in the face of devastation. Malaparte speaks openly about the "trade" in African-American soldiers in occupied Italy, when desperate Italian families sent their daughters looking specifically for Black America soldiers to bring home -- because they were more generous and kind, more loyal and more loving -- and because they always brought loads of G.I. food to their adoptive families. You wouldn't get away with that kind of truth now, not in America. Malaprate also gives us some of the most catastropic scenes every written about the aftermath of WWII in Italy, scenes which will embed in your memory forever and recur as nightmares. He is sardonic, yes. But that is a good thing, for war is a bloody joke on those who somehow survive. Malaparte speaks of the exhausted Italian soldiers who, during the American occupation, were told they had to "live up to the shame of Italy" and were dressed in green-dyed uniforms taken from dead British soldiers, many with bullet holes and blood stains. This is a story of an insider's story of catastrophe, loss of beliefs, ruin, bombed out homes in which one still had to live, a country's most beautiful women flung at the victors to provide food for the defeated . . . . Don't miss this book. Take it from me. The only book in American literature anything like it is "The Hogs of Cold Harbor" about the true victors in our so-called "Civil War". You're missing a fundamental exercise in horrifying, bloody, hilarious literature if you don't try Malaparte's "The Skin". He's up there with Louis Ferdinand Celine, looking down on us from their crosses.

Curzio Malaparte is a curious case, both politically & aesthetically suspect, yet a writer of undeniable power. You hardly dare trust his bizarrer testimony, but remain convinced that some terrible things must indeed have happened to him. His writing features an ornateness & musical repetition that puts it closer to fin de siècle poetry & prose poetry, than rather seems suited to the darkest crannies of the Second World War, which he experienced apparently from both sides & both low & high, bewilderingly invulnerable but deeply wounded in sensibility, so that from Kaputt, where he is able to view the infernal panorama almost with detachment, to The Skin, a cruel progression is revealed; he becomes nearly deranged, so despairing that even rescue feels fake, and victory hollow. I can't think of another writer (not even Céline--his closest analogue) quite so corroded with irony, nor able to wring such scathing, poignant beauty out of the depths. He is a Rilke who shipped out, or the one Fascist who kept his conscience to the end: thus a witness who has much to teach us today, for all our howling & desperate complicity.

WW II from a different perspective. A must read