On May 21st at 7:30 pm. EST Community Bookstore is hosting a virtual conversation about Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris between writer Gary Indiana and NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank. You can register for free and learn more here.
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Curzio Malaparte is a phrasemaker before anything else—sensuous phrases that stick in the imagination for a long time (“the sun’s baked-honey brilliance”). Although he fancied himself a thinker (and was quite jealous of the renown of Gide, Sartre, and Camus), his pronouncements on “the French” (“France is the last homeland of intelligence”) or on communism or existentialism or on women are often confused or repetitive or banal or wrong, whereas his recording of a sensation or a bizarre anecdote or his memory of a strange phrase is always indelible if not unerring.
In fact he is what the French call a “mythomane,” a compulsive liar who embellishes the truth, not necessarily for gain but out of an irrepressible compulsion. Anyone who has read his World War II masterpieces Kaputt orThe Skin can never forget the memorable but improbable scene when the starving Neapolitans serve to American officers a boiled young girl in mayonnaise attached to a fish tail, claiming she is a mermaid from the aquarium, or the scene when horses plunging out of a pond in northern Europe freeze in place and offer visitors a stationary merry-go-round.
Or the court of the Nazi “king” of Poland who, when he’s not sensitively playing the classical piano, leads his courtiers to the ghetto where the Germans shoot Jewish children for fun, pretending they’re rats. And where Malaparte himself offers a weeping little girl who’s starving a fat Havana cigar after she proudly refuses money. Or there’s a moment when a Fascist officer opens a pot of freshly shucked oysters and admits it’s really 40 pounds of human eyes. I’m not saying these events didn’t happen but Malaparte seems to have observed more than his share of grotesque oddities. Whether true or not, these scenes render perfectly the horrors of war.
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