James Bone recommends Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte

As Books came together, it became clear early on that war was on people's minds.

These are some of the titles in the book on the topic of war: Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal; Doing Battle, by Paul Fussel; The Inhuman Land, by Jozef Czapski; The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz; One Woman in the War, by Alaine Polcz; and The White Rose, by Inge Scholl.

James Bone, New York correspondent for the Times (London) and former war correspondent, recommended Kapputt, by  Curzio Malaparte.  

Kaputt: A Novel
Curzio Malaparte
1944

Ever since I first read Kaputt, I have been tormented by Curzio Malaparte's description of meeting Ante Pavelic, the Croatian fascist leader in World War II. The Italian war reporter noticed a wicker basket on Pavelic's desk that seemed to be filled with shelled oysters "as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London." He politely inquired if the oysters came from the Dalmatian coast. "It's a present from my loyal ustashis," Pavelic replied. "Forty pounds of human eyes."

Malaparte (whose nom de plume was a play on "Bonaparte") was, as we might say today, "embedded" with the Nazis. As a correspondent for Italy's Corriere della Sera, he was able to tour the Eastern Front behind Axis lines. From this vantage, he recounts the casual, even flippant, brutality of the German war machine. The book is filled with the horrifying, indeed surreal, images of the war: half-buried bodies with their outstretched arms serving as signposts; German soldiers laughing at their starving Russian prisoners feasting on fellow inmates in order to survive; Jews strung up on trees next to their dogs (their "Jewish dogs").

Published in Naples in 1944, Kaputt was a sensation at the end of World War II. I own a ragged English-language paperback from that time that boasts "over a million copies sold." But the book was carefully subtitled "A Novel," making it a profoundly troublesome work. Malaparte, as we know from his newspaper reports, actually did meet Pavelic. But the anecdote about the eyeballs (still a staple of Serb propaganda) is likely hyperbole. Other key episodes of the book were also invented. He never did, apparently, tour the Warsaw Ghetto in his Italian officer's uniform and console the suffering Jews by telling them in French that "un jour vous serez libres, vous serez heureux et libres" (one day, you will be free, you will be happy and free). You have to wonder about the sort of person who would make that up.

The book, assembled from a smuggled manuscript, is an irreplaceable artifact of World War II. Not only was Malaparte an eyewitness to a morbid culture, he was also a product of it-a mercurial personality with a talent for reinventing himself. An early Italian fascist-later expelled from the party and banished by Mussolini to the island of Lipari-he was a Communist at the end of his life (and is perhaps best remembered today for Casa Malaparte, the house he built on Capri that was featured in Godard's Contempt). There are questions about whether he rewrote parts of Kaputt when it became clear that the Allies would win the war.

For a journalist, the fascination of the book lies in how the blending of fact and fiction yields such a powerful and enduring result. (In this, he is a precursor of that other great war reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski.) For, despite being an unreliable and self-aggrandizing narrator, he captured the perverse imagination and aesthetics of that broken world. In one of his central insights, he writes of the Germans: "Their cruelty is made of fear; they are ill with fear."

James Bone

James Bone, the longtime New York correspondent for the Times (London), is a former war reporter who has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, Nicaragua, Northern Ireland, and Panama, as well as the 9/11 attack on New York. His great-grandfather was Britain's first official war artist.