MALAPARTE

A searching life, by diplomat and historian Serra, of Italy’s arguably most enigmatic writer.

Born Curt Suckert to a middle-class German father, Curzio Malaparte cultivated aristocratic pretenses and was narcissistic, contrary, and ungovernable. He was also a brilliant writer and subtle thinker with a genius for being on the outs with whoever was in power and for making enemies; as Serra puts its, he “almost always ended up on the wrong side, with a love for lost causes (if not losers) that is hard not to admire.” That depends on your viewpoint: Malaparte championed Mussolini, after all, if in a qualified way, with a rather confusing political agenda that for a time embraced the strange-bedfellow fascismo rosso, “red fascism,” suppressed the minute Mussolini actually came to power. Malaparte did much as he pleased all the same, and, surprisingly, he was only occasionally in trouble for it: he self-published sometimes subversive books, built the modernist house made famous in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Contempt, and went to the Russian front to report on how the war was going for the Nazis (who weren’t pleased by his conclusions), all capped off by his magnificently eccentric memoir-cum-war novel Kaputt. To this day Malaparte defies easy categorization: Che Guevara and European neofascists alike read his political essays; American intelligence agents gave him a pass even as top Italian communists befriended him; and at the end of his life, briefly dazzled by Mao Zedong, he traveled to China to see yet another revolution in the works. In this ambitious corrective to Malaparte’s self-mythologizing, Serra writes that he was consistent in at least one way: “Malaparte does not take anyone’s side, never forgets his role as an observer and often as a voyeur, in a Proustian sense.”

A rewarding essay in modern Italian intellectual history as embodied by one of its most curious figures.