Kaputt

I have been reading literature for almost 50 years and have been teaching it for many, many years. In all of these years I have not found a novel more powerfully written about the horrors, absurdity, and perhaps sheer insanity of WWII and war in general.D M Thomas' Pictures at an Exhibition, among a few others, like Grosssman's Life and Fate, comes closest, however. This is not to deny the power of Homer, Euripides, Tolstoy, Mailer, Vonnegut, et. al. They are all great. But the beauty of Malaparte's images, his enormous power of description, the depiction of our inhumanity to one another and the animal world--the title of each of his sections is an animal, Horses, Mice, etc.--is stunning. Much of his enormous imact is created by a profound sense of irony, as when one of the Black Guard, a nordic "angel" follows him through the Warsaw Ghetto, or the deer with the Nazi flag stuck in its back at a Nazi dinner party, falling under the carving knife of Malaparte's "gracious" hostess, for example. This is a book that should be read slowly and thoughtfully. Malaparte's literary talent will elate you even if the subject matter horrifies you--as it should. This is one of those little-known books that deserves to be universally read and seriously thought about and discussed. Malaparte was one of the great writers of our century and it is wonderful to see his brilliant work back in print.

As is stated in the Hofstadter's Afterword, in my edition, Malaparte's writing is "....haunted by the desire to have been Proust." For anyone who has read Proust, this is clear from the title of the first chapter of the work, "Du Cote de Guuermantes". But of course, Malaparte is no Proust. No writer in all of literature is. Further, the setting of the opus is not the dinner tables of the aristocracy or of the haute bourgeoisie, but battlefronts in Eastern Europe and the dinner tables of ruthless men at war-Nevertheless, Malaparte does manage to capture some of the Proustian effect in his camera-eye, vivid, detailed snapshots of this environment. But-caveat lector-this environment is so loathsome, bestial and vile-as wars tend to be-that one is in danger in becoming, by absorbing one's self in this book, in losing any hope in or affection for humanity. From horseheads rising from the surface from the frozen over Lake Laguda (perhaps the most lasting image, because so beautiful and horrific at once), to the officer who keeps a jar of human eyeballs of the partisans he is fighting on his desk to, well, any number of ghastly scenes, it is impossible for the reader to come away from Malaparte's take on the war, unaffected (excepting, of course, "readers" who dismiss the book out of hand and leave it deliberately on the airplane as one reviewer admits to doing).-But, perhaps, this reviewer's reaction is understandable. None of us relish looking on the dark, bestial side of men and women who might well be ourselves, given different circumstances of time and place. But what significantly marks this book apart from all other war writings is the unwillingness to overtly take sides. It sometimes seems that one is reading an account of an extraterrestrial who has visited Europe to give an account of human behaviour. You won't find any Neo-Nazi glorification here, but neither will you find any of the late Stephen Ambrose's "Greatest Generation" American triumphalism. This is what truly makes the work great and a must have for every literate human unafraid of the tableaux that war presents: This, seemingly at least, disinterested depiction of the behaviour of men at their worst-The only writer Malaparte resembles, really, is not Proust, but the German writer Ernst Junger, whose journals, alas, have not yet been translated into English. Well, prospective reader, there's the gauntlet-pick it up, if you dare.

War novels generally fall into two categories: 1) bad historical fiction by war buffs obsessed with tactics and detailed information on vehicles and aircraft used therein; and 2) overly-simplified, obnoxiously-preachy narratives where deeper moral lessons are learned amongst the endless human suffering. That's why I find KAPUTT so fascinating. Malaparte is a nihilist, a true cynic, with the few compassionate sentiments he utters looking ridiculous next to his ambivalence and inaction. KAPUTT is a novel about an inherent destructive malaise, a novel full of contempt for humanity, for the ignorance and baseness that almost completely eradicated European civilization during the first half of the 20th Century. I haven't read this book in ten years and I still have that image of the horses in Lake Ladoga embedded in my mind, the description of the pogrom, the gelatinous eyes--truly haunting and unforgettable stuff. As the afterward says, Malaparte, due to his relative affluence, was able to drift between partisans and fascists with ease. No doubt many readers will fault him for this, for not standing up valiantly to defend the victims of Nazi/Fascisti oppression. Malaparte was content to describe, with a frighteningly-removed irony, the abhorrent madness of modern man. If you're interested in this-or-that pincer movement or how this unit fought valiantly in battle, this novel will bore you out of your skull. If on the other hand, however, you want to read about someone wandering about in the aftermath, sitting and ruminating beside the bloated corpses of horses and sleeping in empty, abandoned homes, KAPUTT is the war novel for you.

Curzio Malaparte was like me, an infantry officer and a journalist. He served in the ranks of the French Army in World War 1 and then as a war correspondent on the eastern front with the Germans, on the northern front with the Finns, and in Poland with the occupation authorities during world war 11. A man who acquired both culture and status by sheer force of personality he was the director of press at the fatal 'Peace' conference of Versailles in 1919, which half ended World War 1 and set the scene for World War 11. The book, as Walter Murch wrote in Zoetrope magazine in 1998 is a searing revelation not only of war and its manifest evil, but of something much more serious, that of the evil that apparently civilised men and women can do, when all restraints are lifted. There comes a time when the facts soar out of our reach, either of the imagination or of the mind, when they are too terrible to contemplate. I find this with the Holocaust. My mind simply refuses to grapple with the enormity of it, taken together with the enormity of the Russian losses, which always make me weep as I enter Moscow past the anti tank traps that are still there. In Kaputt I can feel Malaparte cringing from the horror, but at the same time determined to find some way to decscribe it. And I feel he succeeds. He does enable a person to confront the fact that it was a bunch of classical music lovers, led by Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, who created the Ghetto in order to "liberate the Jews". More than almost any other writer on World War 11, he gets under the skin of the Germans, and into the Nazi mind and perhaps even more so, into the mind of the anti semites of Roumania, Poland anD Russia, who made their own awful contribution to the Holocaust. Younger readers should not let the slightly dated style put them off. Here is the inner reality of war as it has seldom been described. Here is the Nazi mind as seldom seen. Here is the terrible truth of World War 11, made accessible (just) to those who did not directly experience it. And learn from the two most poignant scenes in the book; the one in which he fails to do anything about the Jews of Jassy, and the one in which he tries to get under the skin of Frank, a man in whom banality and evil fought for control and in which evil emerged triumphant and out of which 6 million Jews died. Few can have come so close to the ultimate malignancy and lived. But seldom has the effect of guilty and the burden of hoplessness been so well portrayed. A book for all time.

Yes, it's overwritten. Yes, One becomes impatient with its often flowery prose (translated from the Italian). And no, it's impossible to tell what's true and what's fiction. I first read "Kaputt" when I was about 12 years old and accepted it as journalism. Later, I was surprised to find it described as a novel. Whatever it is, it's a masterpiece. Italian journalist Malaparte, who converted from fascism to a kind of quasi-socialism (despite what some might think, he was never a communist and eventually became a devout Catholic), served time in an Italian prison for his dangerously critical writing about Mussolini. He was freed through the intervention of the italian foreign minister, Count Ciano, who was Mussolini's son-in-law and who was himself later shot by Mussolini for treason. Sounds interesting already, eh? Malaparte gives us supposedly first-hand accounts, while working as a war correspondent in the uniform of an Italian captain, of his experiences in the drawing rooms of fascist officials; at the Leningrad front and the Warsaw Ghetto; and at the sites of massacres of Jews, gypsies, and intellectuals. He writes in two complementary styles. His ironic, laid-back style accentuates the horror of the nazis' matter-of-fact attitude about the atrocities they committed. His lyrical style paints word-pictures of his impressions of the sights and sounds of the towns and fields of old Europe. The result is an almost exhaustingly epic depiction of the destruction of European culture from the unique perspective of one who mingled with many of those responsible. Be patient with the book when you start it. It grows on you.