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9781681378701

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To this day Malaparte defies easy categorization: Che Guevara and European neofascists alike read his political essays; American intelligence agents gave him a pass even as top Italian communists befriended him; and at the end of his life, briefly dazzled by Mao Zedong, he traveled to China to see yet another revolution in the works. In this ambitious corrective to Malaparte’s self-mythologizing, Serra writes that he was consistent in at least one way: “Malaparte does not take anyone’s side, never forgets his role as an observer and often as a voyeur, in a Proustian sense.” -Kirkus Reviews

“Serra’s purpose in Malaparte: A Biography is not to vindicate Malaparte, which he couldn’t do even if he wanted to. . . . Instead, Serra proceeds forensically and with great wit, bringing the intellectual and political history of five decades to bear on Malaparte’s accretion of enthusiasms, feuds, and identities.” —Andrew Holter, The Baffler “To this day Malaparte defies easy categorization: Che Guevara and European neofascists alike read his political essays; American intelligence agents gave him a pass even as top Italian communists befriended him; and at the end of his life, briefly dazzled by Mao Zedong, he traveled to China to see yet another revolution in the works. In this ambitious corrective to Malaparte’s self-mythologizing, Serra writes that he was consistent in at least one way: ‘Malaparte does not take anyone’s side, never forgets his role as an observer and often as a voyeur, in a Proustian sense.’” —Kirkus Reviews “Indeed the writer Malaparte was, or tried to be, numerous characters at the same time: soldier, diplomat, trade unionist, man of action, politician, journalist, film director . . . always, of course, in his own manner. That is why the task that Serra took on, that of writing several biographies at once of one and the same subject, was of almost insuperable difficulty. The fact that he has succeeded in it is due to Maurizio Serra’s being not only an elegant literary critic but also an established historian. . . . In Serra’s book, all of Malaparte’s lives are examined and effectively dissected one by one, but the author never loses sight of the man as an overall whole.” —Alberto Indelicato, Diogenes “An uncompromising biography.” —René de Ceccatty, Le Monde “[Serra’s] investigation delves into the multiple skins of the ‘chameleon’ Malaparte, sorting out the mythomania and truths of an indefatigable provocateur, bard of the agonies of old Europe.” —Christophe Ono-dit-Biot, Le Point

Author Information

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.

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