I found Curzio Malaparte on my father’s bookshelf, between the volumes on Kosovo and Srebrenica. I was drawn in by the name, Kaputt, and when I turned it over, I was drawn even further in by the cover—the grin of devilish fake teeth floating in darkness on the New York Review Books edition. This was where I found him, and where I quickly fell in love. Malaparte was an Italian F. Scott Fitzgerald character on the frontlines. Mussolini’s foreign correspondent on the Eastern Front; the failed propagandist, Italian diplomat and francophile dandy, whose morbid dispatches behind Nazi lines, were gruesomely …read more
Source: The American Interest
