Loads of Learned Lumber

Monday, May 25, 2020

Curzio Malaparte, _Kaputt_, trans. Cesare Foligno

MALAPARTE (WHOSE BIRTH name was Kurt Erich Suckert--German father, Italian mother) was in on the ground floor of Fascism, participating in Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome. Apparently he was a maverick Fascist, though, frequently getting on the wrong side of Mussolini, even going to prison a time or two. His friendship with Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, seems to have saved him from worse. (Under the circumstances, you would think Ciano would come off in this book a lot better than he does, where he seems like a big-headed womanizing buffoon.)

Malaparte spent a lot of World War II traveling in Europe as a journalist for the Corriere della Sera, and Kaputt is based on what he saw--or might have seen, or perhaps mainly imagined--in Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Finland, Germany. Reportage and fiction are intertwined in the book, and no one is altogether positive which episodes he witnessed and which he conjured up.

Did he really see dead horses in a frozen lake, "where, during the winter, the heads of the horses gripped by the ice had emerged above the glistening crust of the ice, and where a little of their jaded odor still lingered in the damp air of the night"?

Did he really see Himmler in a sauna? "Around his flabby breasts grow two little circles of hair, two halos of blond hair; perspiration gushed like milk from his nipples."

Did he really spend time in a military brothel in which young Jewish women were forced to work, knowing that their next stop, once the soldiers tired of them, would be the death camps?

Did he really see a cattle car filled with the corpses of Romanian Jews?

No one knows, basically, but Kaputt, mostly written before the war ended, is the grandaddy of the fictions since in which the Eastern front of the war is revealed as a 24/7 Boschian nightmare: Danilo Kîs's Tomb for Boris Davidovich, William Vollmann's Central Europe, Jonathan Littell's Les bienveillantes. And Malaparte is one amazing writer.

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