The Skin

by Curzio Malaparte

Book Overview

In The Skin, Curzio Malaparte extends the great fresco of European society he began in Kaputt. There the scene was Eastern Europe, here it is Italy during the years from 1943 to 1945; instead of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590176227
• ISBN13: 9781590176221
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

The XXth Century Divina Comedia

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...

Degradation and despair in WW2 Europe

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"...

When Worlds Collide...

"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.

A classic

I don't know this translation but "The Skin" is one of the most powerful books that I have ever read. Ostensibly a portrait of Naples following the city's liberation by the allied forces in 1943, it in fact provides a view of the state of Europe before, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than a constructed narrative, it's a series of episodes set in war-time Naples or on the Russian Front where Malaparte witnessed the horrors committed by the Nazis (one particularly terrifying episode set in a Russian forest at night will haunt me for a long while). There are also lighter moments (such as the blackly comic dinner for American officers when the last surviving fish of the Naples aquarium is served on a bed of coral) but the one thing that comes to the fore throughout is the sheer power of the survival spirit, the lengths that human beings will go to save their skin. Malaparte's magnificently poetic language makes this one of the classics of the 20th century.