‘Malaparte: A Biography’
By Maurizio Serra, Translated by Joseph Twilley
New York Review Books, 736 pages

The revival of interest in the Italian Fascist writer Curzio Malaparte, whose real name was Kurt Erich Suckert, is a testament to the enduring truth that great writers can dabble in disagreeable politics. A courtier, albeit a minor one, of Benito Mussolini, Malaparte reported on Europe’s darkest days with a cold and serrated style.  He was a journalist and a fabulist whose masterpiece, “Kaputt,” is “Heart of Darkness” adapted to the age of Hitler.

The new biography of Malaparte from the historian and diplomat Maurizio Serra is a work of literary distinction in its own merit. Signore Serra paints his subject in the round, and is unafraid to opine on Malaparte’s personality or his prose. Mr. Serra is especially withering when it comes to Malaparte’s obsequiousness to Il Duce when the leader lorded over Italy from the Palazzo Venezia. The writer sang a different tune after Mussolini was strung up. 

Malaparte, who served with distinction in World War I, was hardly alone among collaborators of all stripes who after the defeat of the Axis protested that they were sworn to the Resistance the whole time. Mr. Serra describes the “chameleon nature” of a man who “breathed the air of totalitarian ideologies without becoming infected.” Mr. Serra reckons that Malaparte “had less to be forgiven for than many of his colleagues.”

Mr. Serra, whose book won the Goncourt Prize when it was first published in 2011, eschews the dry neutrality often adopted by biographers in favor of pungent prose that is unfrightened by Malaparte’s ghost even as it is clear-eyed about his literary achievements — and shortcomings. Malaparte, on a trip to Communist China at the end of his life, fawned over Mao and even bequeathed his villa at Capri to the People’s Republic.

The biographer is unsparing in denouncing Malaparte’s blindness to the “grotesque dictatorship that was preparing to sacrifice millions of human lives.” Yet observation was Malaparte’s strength. Mr. Serra names it as a “powerful capacity for assimilation, to the detriment of analytic rigor.” Churchill called the Europe of World War II a “wounded animal,” and “Kaputt,” Mr. Serra reckons, “glides like a bird of prey over all of Europe at war.”

For readers who can only long for Malaparte’s Italian, New York Review Books has brought out, in addition to this biography, a trilogy of Malaparte’s reportage. “Kaputt” is followed by “The Skin,” an account of a ruined and carnivalesque Naples in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Finally, there is “The Kremlin Ball,” an unfinished but acidic look at Stalin’s court pulled together during Malaparte’s trip to Moscow in 1929.

Mr. Serra provides a generous account of the personalities and factions that made up Italy’s byzantine political landscape from the March on Rome through the inchoate Cold War in the 1950s. Malaparte was in the thick of it all, and Mr. Serra reckons that he “loved power … he was a born fighter and could prove by turns hard and flexible, brutal and compliant, inflexible and submissive.” An editor at La Stampa, he was driven to “pick out the smallest typo.”

One book of Malaparte’s that is frustratingly difficult to find in English is “Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution.” He wrote it in French between the wars during a frost in his relations with Il Duce. Mr. Serra judges that the book “was never quite ‘The Prince’ of the twentieth century,” but that it succeeded in elucidating the developments of a revolutionary age. Mr. Serra calls it the “manual of every professional conspirator.” 

There is only one place to start for readers new to Malaparte, though — “Kaputt.” Mr. Serra judges that even “allowing for an inevitable measure of fabulation, this is great journalism,” reporting  that “paints a world shaken to its foundations.” One chapter portrays the Iași pogrom, a spate of violence against Romanian Jews that claimed more than 13,000 lives. Another chapter finds Malaparte in Finland at a sauna with a shvitzing Heinrich Himmler.

One of the most memorable scenes of “Kaputt” is fiction. Malaparet reports a meeting with the Croatian fascist leader, Ante Pavelic, renowned for his brutality. The reporter spies a wicker basket on the head of state’s desk, filled to the brim with what  appeared to be “mussels, or shelled oysters.” Pavelic replies that the “slimy and jelly-like mass” is actually a “present from my loyal usatshis. Forty pounds of human eyes.” 

Malaparte, who was not an antisemite, tried his hand at the movies, and his writing can touch the  cinematic. Like Vladimir Jabotinsky, he was equal parts journalist and artist. Take Malaparte’s indelible account of a herd of horses flash-frozen in Lake Ladoga. He writes that “the lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses’ heads … The white flames of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes.”

One of Mr. Serra’s startling observations is that Malaparte was drawn to the angels and Sabbath candles of Marc Chagall. It is difficult to imagine two artists more different than the child of the shtetl and the Italian fascist who visited the Warsaw Ghetto and dined with the Nazi official he called the new “King of Poland,” Hans Frank. Yet both Chagall and Malaparte had an eye for the surreal and savage turn Europe took in the last century.