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Curzio Malaparte's Shock Tactics

The Italian writer, once Mussolini’s pet propagandist and later a literary cult hero, was an unmatched chronicler of Europe’s horrors.

“An unrestrained social climber, excessively vain, and a chameleon-like snob,” the Communist leader Antonio Gramsci wrote of him, judging him “capable of any villainy.” The Italian Right, too, came to distrust him, suspecting that he was a fair-weather Fascist, ready to bolt when opportunity called. “Judging from Kaputt,” a French journalist remarks, “one would say that Malaparte eats nothing but nightingales’ hearts, served on plates of old Meissen and Nymphenburg porcelain at the tables of Royal Highnesses, Duchesses and Ambassadors.” When “The Skin” appeared, in 1949, it became a sensation in Italy. Malaparte’s last bid for glory as a foreign correspondent took him to China in 1956, where he claimed to meet Mao Zedong and played the diplomat, pleading for the release of European priests from Chinese prisons—which, to his surprise, he found more humane than the Italian ones he had been in.

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