This is one of the better written books I've ever read. In fact, I've read it three times and each time I was suprised by its superb irony, excellent dialogues and lyric style. Reading it, I used to think I was reading again Dante's Comedia, but written in 1943 and sewed to our material earth and humanity, instead to Heaven or Hell.

Now that the world is at war again, may be we should read again this book...

This is not an easy book, and it is not a book for everybody. In fact, if you believe in the manifest destiny of your country or are used to dividing people between winners and losers, save your time and do not buy this book because you would not understand it.

Malaparte's book is a series of autobiographic episodes set in WW2 Italy. It shows the despair and degradation of a place where everything, everything is for sale and the only thing that matters is your skin, saving your skin and living another day. In many respects, however, Italy becomes a metaphor for the whole of Europe (watch the movie "Berlin - year 0") in those times, and perhaps mankind. In fact, Malaparte's language is often poetic and his book transcends his times to become a universal portrait of suffering man. It is the suffering, defeated man that Malaparte takes pity of, while describing man in his hour of triumph as "unbearable".

Among all the rhetoric on the Liberation and the magnificent new future that awaited Europe after the war, here is a writer who preferred to set his eyes on a painful present. Malaparte gives us a description of a terrible time which has the same timeless value as Thucidides' account of the plague in Athens.

A particularly enjoyable part of the book is the description of the contact between the Old and the New World. Malaparte, an officer of the Italian Corps that fought alongside the Allies in the Italian campaign from 1943 onwards, was very good friend with some American officers and knew General Clark. He has left us a wonderful description of the mixed feelings of the US troops in experiencing, often for the first time, the reality of Europe, of their obscure fascination and, at the same time, contempt for "corrupt" Europe, of their genuine innocence mixed with a presumption of moral superiority. In an unforgettable dialogue, an American woman serving in the auxiliary forces contemptiously asks Malaparte how can women in Naples prostitute themselves for a packet of cigarettes, clearly they must be putting their habit ahead of their honor. Malaparte drily answers that "With a packet of cigarettes, they can buy 3 kgs of bread"...

"The Skin" is a complex and fascinating book.

Ostensibly it is about the American army arriving in Italy during WWII and coming into contact (often for the first time) with Europe's spiritual and moral corruption and degradation. The idea was copied a (little) bit by Joseph Heller in Catch-22. If you've read Catch-22, you have SOME an idea about what to expect.

But "The Skin" is a deeper book than Catch-22, and Malaparte was much more interested in the differences between the decadence of the old world and the brash, conquering innocence of the New World, where things such as defeat are considered physically and morally impossible. Defeat is actually seen as morally reprehensible and somehow or other, the fault of the defeated.

Unlike Heller, Malaparte never portrays the military or the politicians as out and out bufoons: he realizes that people are invariably more complex than that.

It is a rare combination of intellectual writing, combined with moments of vibrantly dark humour. An example: when an American liason officer speaks about Italian women selling their bodies, Malaparte replies that all that they are actually selling is their hunger. And that it'd be a marvellous thing if every American soldier could take home a piece of hunger to show his wife what amazing things you can buy for money.

The title, by the way, refers to Malaparte's comment that once flags have been proven worthless and shamed, the only flag people are willing to fight for is that of their own skin. The indomitable spirit of mankind is shown to be a greedy, grasping thing that will stop at nothing in order to continue existing. And the spectacle is anything but edifying.

this little book is full of information about the house, architect, and owner. the drawings wonderful, the pictures really sets the house back in the time of Malparte, and the ideas that went behind the house is not hidden in the book.

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 a number 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.

I read Kaputt about a year ago, and I still can't get it out of my head. What I remember most are the gruesome, shocking acts of violence committed by the "humans" in this book. As a portrait of the horrors of war, Kaputt is as powerful as Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird and Tolstoy's War and Peace. My only complaint is that at times Malaparte seems to be exploiting the violence. Don't get me wrong, I'm not politically correct or prudish. I just feel like that for such a touchy subject (genocide), there should be some boundaries. On the other hand, perhaps Malaparte was playing with the Grand Guignol genre (like Thomas Harris and Ridley Scott in Hannibal). Whatever the case may be, Kaputt is an unforgettable novel!

I've been an avid reader of WWII for the past 6 years, I have read historical fiction about WWII and hundreds of non-fiction accounts and documentaries. This book is horrible compared to practically any of them, the ideas portrayed about the war being a machine and the soldiers fighting it the workers simply leaves me without words to convey how horribly written this work was. I read the first 100 pages, even with those I had to skim through the majority of it and was simply going out of my mind to try and finish it faster and faster. Only thing that was of some interest was to see that Ukrainians were very rarely found in the POW's that the Germans were taking when in Bessarabia and Ukraine in 1941, mostly central asians and far easterners.

The Volga Rises in Europe is a collection of dispatches describing the German invasion of Russia in World War II, written for publication in Italy. Malaparte accompanied the German Army in the Ukraine between June and September 1941 and was a guest of the Finnish Army in the Karelian Isthmus between March and November of 1942. Notwithstanding its subject and the picture on the cover, the book is more of a travelogue than a war memoir. Although Malaparte gets to the front lines on occasion, more often his accounts describe scenes of past battles after the front has moved on. Much of the book is a description of the terrain, such as the Finnish forests, and the people he meets, both soldier and civilian. In addition, Malaparte engages in a fair amount of social commentary and speculation, particularly about the Soviet system. His style is often poetic although there is a tendency to imbue certain incidents with more importance than they perhaps merit. Malaparte is at his best when he describes the people he meets such as the Ukrainian peasants trying to reopen their church, which the Soviets have turned into a seed warehouse, or his visit with an elderly woman and her friends and relations at Soroki. For those interested in military history there are descriptions of small skirmishes, the crossing of the Dneistr and attacks on the Stalin Line. In Part 2, Malaparte describes the trenches outside the besieged Leningrad, the siege of the naval station at Kronstadt, as well as the convoys to Leningrad over frozen Lake Ladoga. Malaparte makes it clear that from the beginning of the war, the Russians were fighting to the last man. I was also surprised at the frequency with which Russian aircraft appear early in the war since other accounts relate that they were largely destroyed in the opening days. Overall, this book was not what I expected, but is very readable and provides some frank descriptions of lesser known aspects of the war.