Experience postwar Europe through the diary of a fascinating and witty twentiethcentury writer and artist. Recording his travels in France and Switzerland, Curzio Malaparte encounters famous figures such as Cocteau and Camus and captures the fraught, restless spirit of Paris after the trauma of war. In 1947 Curzio Malaparte returned to Paris for the first time in fourteen years. In between, he had been condemned by Mussolini to five years in exile and, on release, repeatedly imprisoned. In his intervals of freedom, he had been dispatched as a journalist to the Eastern Front, and though many of his reports from the bloodlands of Poland and Ukraine were censored, his experiences there became the basis for his unclassifiable postwar masterpiece and international bestseller, Kaputt. Now, returning to the one country that had always treated him well, the one country he had always loved, he was something of a star, albeit one that shines with a dusky and disturbing light. The journal he kept while in Paris records a range of meetings with remarkable peopleJean Cocteau and a dourly unwelcoming Albert Camus among themand is full of Malapartes characteristically barbed reflections on the temper of the time. It is a perfect model of ambiguous reserve as well as humorous selfexposure. There is, for example, Malapartes curious custom of sitting out at night and barking along with the neighborhood dogsdogs, after all, were his only friends when in exile. The French find it puzzling,...

Binding: Paperback;360 pages; Publisher: New York Review Books; Classification: FA; Weight: 420 g; Dimensions: 127 x 202 x 19

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