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World Hotels - Kaputt (New York Review Books Classics)
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List Price: $16.95
Our Price: $11.53
Your Save: $ 5.42 ( 32% )
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Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.54217092
EAN: 9781590171479
ISBN: 1590171470
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 448
Publication Date: 2005-04-10
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Release Date: 2005-06-30
Studio: NYRB Classics
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Editorial Reviews:
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Curzio Malaparte was a disaffected supporter of Mussolini with a taste for danger and high living. Sent by an Italian paper during World War II to cover the fighting on the Eastern Front, Malaparte secretly wrote this terrifying account of a world sliding toward the abyss, which became an international bestseller when it was published after the war. Telling of the siege of Leningrad, of glittering dinner parties with Nazi leaders, and of trains disgorging bodies in war-devastated Romania, Malaparte paints a picture of humanity at its most depraved.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Horribly cruel and somehow beautiful
Comment:
I read a news article that this was one of Walid Jumblatt's favourite books, he presented it to Robert Fisk, with the above inscription. http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3010168.ece
This is hardly a good reason to read a book, but there you are. It is written by an Italian diplomat, who had the freedom to travel through Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. There are many shocking things in the book, initially the casual treatment of dead bodies in war-zones, but eventually the absolute lack of morality at many levels of society. Through all this, the author, Curzio Malaparte, moves with an air of studied neutrality, despite the barbarities he witnesses, and the psychopaths he interviews.
In terms of style, there are many flashbacks and references, which can lead to layers of removal and make the narrative difficult to follow. In the end I became quite immune from the shocking barbarity described. I think the book is useful in the sense that it shows the accommodations which occupied societies engaged in during the way years.
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Summary: "The Dead Were Fleeing from the Train"
Comment: This book was published in 1944 in Italy and in English in 1946. It covers events the author claimed to have observed in 1941-43, presented in seemingly random order, while he served as a war correspondent for a major Italian newspaper, accompanying the German army on the Eastern Front.
Malaparte (1898-1957) was an early member of the Fascist Party in Italy. A man of letters without political influence, he was expelled in the early 1930s and spent some years in internal exile. Between 1938 and 1943, he was arrested several times and imprisoned briefly in Rome. Still, his party connections, earlier diplomatic experience and status as a writer of note enabled him to work from 1941 on the Eastern Front for the Corriere della Sera. He's been called an enigma, contrary, opportunistic, a political chameleon who changed allegiances several times in the course of his life.
His book began abruptly in Sweden, with no background or context, but after a chapter or two his method became clearer. Most of the chapters were devoted to highlighting one or two locations and powerful images that supported the picture of barbarism he was trying to convey. The Leningrad Front ca. 1942 and frozen enemy soldiers used as traffic sentries. The Ukraine in summer 1941 and a foal born from a dying horse. Finland in April 1943, a frozen lake full of dead animals, and a dream of a crucified horse. Krakow in 1943 and a dinner with Hans Frank, the governor-general of conquered Poland. A banquet in Warsaw in February 1942 with German leaders, contrasted with the desperate conditions he observed in the Warsaw Ghetto. A pogrom in Jassy, Romania in June 1941, and so on.
His descriptions showed the German leaders blinded by their racist ideology, capable of playing Chopin with feeling in an afternoon and shooting at a child hours later. And a Balkan leader expressing his love for his homeland and detailing a high-minded political program while keeping body parts of enemies on his desk.
Initially, Malaparte alternated his description of horrors with memories of better days in prewar times, spent in Paris, Capri and elsewhere with cultured friends from many countries of Europe, and with friends in the diplomatic corps of Spain and Sweden during peaceful interludes in wartime Scandinavia. His description of the culture and civilization shared by upper-class friends from many nations was contrasted implicitly with the breakdown of values observed nearly everywhere during the war.
There were many interesting passages, such as when the German governor-general discussed his policy in Poland toward the church, aristocracy, middle class and workers. Moving passages, as when Malaparte observed the Poles' veneration of the Czestochowa Madonna. And terrible ones, as when he and others searched the countryside for an injured Jewish man who'd been taken away during a pogrom. The description of this pogrom must be one of the very early appearances in literature of the Holocaust.
In contrast to some other readers on Amazon, I felt that Malaparte did express shock and outrage about many of the events he experienced. His feelings were demonstrated, for example, in his remarks to the police chief in Jassy, his admiration expressed for another who denounced the chief, his joining the search to help find a victim, his compassion for girls kept in a brothel, and his frequent mockery and sarcasm in reported conversation with the Germans.
In the book's first half, as the gruesome events and images accumulated, cataloging the cruelty, suffering and betrayal of human values, they brought to mind the darkest paintings of Bruegel or Bosch, depicting the triumph of death or the chaos of hell. Here, the book was capable of searing images into the brain. For me, the most forceful example of this kind of writing was found about halfway through, in a chapter titled "Cricket in Poland," which contrasted a banquet of German leaders in Warsaw with the brutal expression of their thinking in a Romanian village.
The chilling atmosphere and focus weren't sustained. Many of the later chapters were devoted mainly to describing long drinking bouts during stopovers in wartime Finland and Sweden, and recording aimless conversation and gossip at parties in wartime Germany and Rome. He was showing the morally indifferent, pleasure-seeking members of the smart set back home who were well insulated from the war and concerned only with who was in and out of favor, and maybe the reality of alternating wartime horror and civilian boredom. But for me, this could've been described at greatly reduced length and with a far more balanced sense of proportion.
The book concluded with absurd situations such as a general's hunt for the last salmon in Lappland and minute analyses of the qualities of Mussolini's son-in-law and various others in Italian society. By the end, I was left with the feeling that the book was grossly uneven, written by a man who gave equal weight to the terrors of war and the table talk of the upper class in wartime, a man with a descriptive gift who lacked a sustained sense of moral outrage.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Horror...beautifully written
Comment: I am truly shocked at the reasons people have given Kaputt a negative review: too icy? too removed? too horrific? What are we talking about here, Disneyland or war?
I have read many, many novels, memoirs, and essays on World War II and never have I encountered anything quite like Malaparte's accounts. The problem with this book, if there is a problem to consider, is how beautifully Malaparte describes absolute horror. The honey-like flow of his writing fades in and out like one's breath in winter. A particular scene of frozen horses, as another reviewer pointed out, will leave you stunned and emotionally wounded. For some reason everything in the book has a cold, yellowless-blue tint, so particular to the North, which makes what's happening all the more chilling.
I will say I could not, was absolutely incapable of, finishing the book all at once. Even for those with strong stomachs, the book is nearly indigestible. I had to shut the book, more than once, and ask myself, how does one get so far and deep into darkness? It truly doesn't seem possible. Yet one walks away from the book thinking, "I could have been one of those people---on either side of the fence." It is this that probably most upsets readers of this book.
I highly recommend readers to browse the NYRB collection for brilliant literature.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the best novel of its kind in our time
Comment: I have been reading literature for almost 50 years and have been teaching it for many, many years. In all of these years I have not found a novel more powerfully written about the horrors, absurdity, and perhaps sheer insanity of WWII and war in general.D M Thomas' Pictures at an Exhibition, among a few others, like Grosssman's Life and Fate, comes closest, however.
This is not to deny the power of Homer, Euripides, Tolstoy, Mailer, Vonnegut, et. al. They are all great. But the beauty of Malaparte's images, his enormous power of description, the depiction of our inhumanity to one another and the animal world--the title of each of his sections is an animal, Horses, Mice, etc.--is stunning. Much of his enormous imact is created by a profound sense of irony, as when one of the Black Guard, a nordic "angel" follows him through the Warsaw Ghetto, or the deer with the Nazi flag stuck in its back at a Nazi dinner party, falling under the carving knife of Malaparte's "gracious" hostess, for example.
This is a book that should be read slowly and thoughtfully.
Malaparte's literary talent will elate you even if the subject matter horrifies you--as it should.
This is one of those little-known books that deserves to be universally read and seriously thought about and discussed. Malaparte was one of the great writers of our century and it is wonderful to see his brilliant work back in print.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Greatest Novel of the 20th Century
Comment: It is an exquisitely written novel about the complicity of high European culture in the atrocities of World War II, about responsibility, about guilt, about disillusionment, about human nature, and about self-consciousness. There is no novel like it in terms of its power and scope. The author is simultaneously an historical actor and narrative voice that does not forgive the author his own complicity. It may change your life, and if it does not, it will change your sense of what and how literature creates....
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