Malaparte and Literary Strangeness a Critical Preface to Kaputt

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

—Novalis

"That's the strangest book I've ever read," a sensitive reader of modern literature declared when I asked his opinion of Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt (1944). In 1776 Samuel Johnson remarked that "nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy [1759] did not last." Malaparte is, of course, no Laurence Sterne, but Kaputt, his best-known work, continues to reach a considerable reading public. An English translation from the original Italian text by Cesare Foligno first appeared in 1946, and WorldCat lists translations in Dutch, Polish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Finnish, Turkish, and Persian. Foligno's translation was reprinted most recently (2005) in the New York Review of Books Classics series, with an afterword by Dan Hofstadter. Such a popular yet puzzling narrative of what the author calls "my long, cruel four-year journey through war" deserves another look. Just as its subject matter is intended to disturb our moral certainties, its strangeness is a deliberate and artistically meaningful effort to disturb our literary expectations. This melding of subject matter and stylistic manner results in one of the great chronicles to emerge from the Second World War.

Previous criticism seems to value Kaputt in spite of its strangeness rather than because of it. The typical approach is to measure it as autobiography or autobiographical fiction or as a mode that swings wildly in between. Curzio Malaparte's work is narrated in the first person by "Malaparte," an officer in the Italian army working as a journalist and moving freely along the front lines of Italy's ally, Germany. But Curzio Malaparte the author is himself the creation of Kurt Erich Suckert, born in Tuscany in 1898 to a Lombard mother and a German father. Suckert changed his name to Curzio Malaparte in 1925—the pun on Buonaparte may suggest "in a bad place." His affection for puns and his tendency to find himself in very bad places show up repeatedly in Kaputt. Anyone, then, inclined to follow Kaputt down the natural path of identifying its narrator with its author should be forewarned.

Dan Hofstadter's afterword reveals the defects of such an approach. (I assume that the series format dictates an afterword; this is unfortunate, for if ever a work needs a foreword rather than an afterword, it is Kaputt.) Hofstadter's is the most eloquent example of this common reaction, and his evident discomfort is shared by many readers: "At times the book feels like an eyewitness reportage, at other times like … a work of historical fiction…. Malaparte never acknowledges when he is switching from one genre to another…. What is journalism here and what is historical fantasy? It's hard … to say, since the author is constantly eating any number of cakes and having them too." After noting "Malaparte's odd weakness for the implausible" exemplified by "his fanciful Hebrew etymology for the German word kaputt," Hofstadter continues, "Of course this is a minor point: but the waffling between genres, the implausibility, the scant regard for fact—all grow more and more troubling as they come to bear on the most terrible atrocities of the last century. Readers have a right to feel puzzled, and to wonder what merit a book may have that values the truth so lightly." Richard Byrne's review of this edition of Kaputt suggests that Hofstadter's assessment is now the norm, as he speaks of "Kaputt's literary trapeze act—its frenzied swings from embassy to atrocity and back again."

The work's mixture of heterogeneous styles and subject matter has caused readerly discomfort for those expecting the more uniform depictions of either the modern novel or history writing. Leaving aside for the moment that Malaparte's intent may have been to cause such discomfort, let us see whether other generic approaches to the work can be more fruitful. I do not believe we should be content with analysis that begins and ends with statements of dichotomies, even well-turned ones such as those of Tim Parks and Gary Indiana. Parks notes...