Malaparte: A Biography

A sweeping, definitive biography of the polarizing Italian writer whose infamous politics, relationship with Mussolini, and irrepresable knack for invention made him one of the most provocative artists and thinkers of his time.

Curzio Suckert (1898-1957) --best known by his pen-name Malaparte--was not only a literary master but one of the mystery men of twentieth-century letters. The son of a cosmopolitan German businessman, his mother an Italian, Malaparte led a life that was intimately entwined from start to finish with the twentieth-century’s troubled history, and only recently has it become possible to begin to separate fact from the screen of fictions with which he continually surrounded himself.

Diplomat and novelist Maurizio Serra tells the story of a precocious child who hurried to enlist in the French Army and endured the horrors of trench warfare in World War I. Taking up the pen of the journalist in the interwar years, Malaparte both allied himself and fell out with Mussolini, writing his provocative bestseller The Technique of the Coup d’Etat to popularise the lessons of the Bolshevik revolution and the fascist March on Rome before being sent into exile in provincial Italy. During World War II, Malaparte reported from the Eastern Front, joined forces with the occupying Allies after Mussolini’s fall, and secretly wrote the first of his two masterpieces, Kaputt, a record of wartime enormities and atrocities that is as stylish as it is hellish. With The Skin, a black comedy about the American Army in Naples, Malaparte cemented a reputation for daring and disturbing originality. A polymath and shapeshifter--fascist, communist, a converted Catholic on his deathbed--a self-mythologizer on the move between society salons, the corridors of power, and the frontlines, Malaparte is a complex and fascinating subject.

Maurizio Serra is a writer and diplomat. He served as the Italian ambassador to the UNESCO. He writes in both Italian and French and was elected to the Académie Française in 2020. His oeuvre is largely comprised of essays about history, literature, and politics.

Stephen Twilley’s translations from the Italian include Francesco Pacifico’s The Story of My Purity and Marina Mander’s The First True Lie, and for NYRB Classics, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Professor and the Siren. He lives in Chicago.