Kaputt (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – April 10, 2005

The Italian war reporter Malaparte won friends and enemies during his lifetime. From all accounts he was a difficult rogue. However, this probably being true, he was a prince of an observer, a dedicated humorist, a master at lyrical description,clever and sly ,who was born to chronicle the Nazi mind during the Second World War. He was also fearless in his writing, so much so that at the end of Kaputt one is drained and needs no more evidence of the horror of Hitler.Interwoven with the details of the Nazi occupation of Poland is beautiful travelogue of Finland, parts of Russia,and small countries that no longer exist. Scenery in all seasons comes to life as Malaparte knits massacres together with nature.This book is almost a dreamy poem. It eliminates ever reading anything else about the demise of the Jews because no historian has ever offered this tragedy as Malaparte has. The book is the voyage of the writers soul from political stance to relief at being alive at the end of it all. A superb read.

I have read various histories of the Third Reich.(Outstanding books are Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 and The Third Reich: A New History.) Malaparte's book is something quite different. It is in no sense objective reporting, although he worked as a journalist on the Eastern Front. But it is an extraordinary work in giving a sense of the atmosphere among people carrying out the worst crimes ever committed. He recounts dinner parties with the Nazi leadership in occupied Poland that are an unforgettable glimpse of the self-indulgence and arrogance of individuals capable of carrying out sustained mass murder and genocide. There is irony at its most bitter in hearing the self-praise of these people, and their admiring awful wives. He shows how great cruelty may involve directing all one's emotions toward oneself. An excellent essay by Dan Hofstadter at the end of the book, that it might pay to read first if one hasn't read much before about the Nazi era, makes it clear that Malaparte thought for quite awhile that the Nazis would win. It quotes a friend of Malaparte's saying he originally praised the Nazi governor Frank, and in the published version there is an uneasy undertone in the recounting of conversations, as though Malaparte was queasy about his previous stance. Malaparte can't be ignored as a stylist, although that may seem a superficial consideration in a book with this subject matter. In fact it is the heart of the matter with this writer - he is fascinated by the style of horror, the style of murderers. And he delivers extraordinary imagery as he tries to capture that. He is writing from within that time, not from a considered, carefully analysed distance. This is also a book that touches on the question of whether people have an inner sense of justice. For many of the people Malaparte recounts, clearly not.

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.

Malaparte was an opportunist, social climber, raconteur and political amateur. He was also a gifted writer. How much is truth in this book, and how much is not, is actually irrelevant if one accepts this as the particular document of a fickle man during the war. The book is a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes, his encounters with personalities, most of them reviled. Whether or not Malaparte actually met them, spoke with them as he relates or whether or not he changed his opinion of them as the war for Italy took a downward course is open to conjecture. What he did do however, was to add to the mythology of war and its horrors. Himmler in a Helsinki lift and later a white blob in a sauna, and a murderer; Hans Frank as a cultured pianist, and murderer; the wives, girlfriends, their table talk that comes around always to the murder of Jews.Kaputt is the title and the meaning is the destruction and end of European "Culture" as it appeared to be in the 1940s. The book does not dwell on war, and if you want a description of war or camps, this is not for you. If you want to experience the ambiguities and contradictions of people under pressure in a highly charged life and death situation, then you will get something from this book. The book was published in 1944 when the war was still going and the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and the "unfit" was taking place and as such is important as being perhaps an indicator that within the elites in the Fascist countries, people (WAGs insluded) - did know what was happening, despite post war denials of this.

Kaputt shows what is ahead of us. Who does not want to know must not read it. The best and the worst time to read it are now.

This is some book. I have never read anything like it, very difficult at the start and takes a lot of perseverance to get through it. I think, I am not sure, if I enjoyed it.

Malaparte visited the eastern theaters on the Axis side as a fascist war correspondent. With fatalistic almost clinical detachment Malaparte narrates his chronicles thinly disguised as a novel.

Malaparte's description of life as a house guest of Hans Frank, Governor-General of Nazi occupied Poland is completely unlike any other writing to come out of the Third Reich. It is in a class apart, with Malaparte as deliciously unreliable narrator.