The Skin

- Authors
- Malaparte, Curzio
- Publisher
- NYRB Classics
- Tags
- war & military , war , political , literary , fiction , historical
- ISBN
- 9781590176221
- Date
- 1949-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
- Size
- 0.27 MB
- Lang
- en
This is the first unexpurgated English edition of Curzio Malaparte’s legendary work *The Skin*. The book begins in 1943, with Allied forces cementing their grip on the devastated city of Naples. The sometime Fascist and ever-resourceful Curzio Malaparte is working with the Americans as a liaison officer. He looks after Colonel Jack Hamilton, “a Christian gentleman . . . an American in the noblest sense of the word,” who speaks French and cites the classics and holds his nose as the two men tour the squalid streets of a city in ruins where liberation is only another word for desperation. Veterans of the disbanded Italian army beg for work. A rare specimen from the city’s famous aquarium is served up at a ceremonial dinner for high Allied officers. Prostitution is rampant. The smell of death is everywhere.
Subtle, cynical, evasive, manipulative, unnerving, always astonishing, Malaparte is a supreme artist of the unreliable, both the product and the prophet of a world gone rotten to the core.