Diary of a Foreigner in Paris

by Curzio Malaparte, Stephen Twilley (Translator), Edmund White (Introduction)

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 people—Jean Cocteau and a dourly unwelcoming Albert Camus among them—and is full of Malaparte’s characteristically barbed reflections on the temper of the time. It is a perfect model of ambiguous reserve as well as humorous self-exposure. There is, for example, Malaparte’s curious custom of sitting out at night and barking along with the neighborhood dogs—dogs, after all, were his only friends when in exile. The French find it puzzling, to say the least; when it comes to Switzerland, it is grounds for prosecution!

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, France, Italy, Italian Literature, Literature, Biography

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Born Kurt Erich Suckert, he was an Italian journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, novelist and diplomat.

Born in Prato, Tuscany, he was a son of a German father and his Lombard wife, the former Evelina Perelli. He studied in Rome and then, in 1918, he started his career as a journalist. He fought in the First World War, and later, in 1922, he took part in the March on Rome.

He later saw he was wrong in supporting fascism. That is proved by reading Technique du coup d`etat (1931), where Malaparte attacked both Adolf Hitler and Mussolini. This book was the origin of his downfall inside the National Fascist Party. He was sent to internal exile from 1933 to 1938 on the island of Lipari.

He was freed on the personal intervention of Mussolini's son-in-law and heir apparent Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini's regime arrested Malaparte again in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1943 and imprisoned him in Rome's infamous jail Regina Coeli. His remarkable knowledge of Europe and its leaders is based upon his own experiences as a correspondent and in the Italian diplomatic service.

In 1941 he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera. He wrote articles about the front in Ukrania, but the fascist dictatorship of Mussollini censored it. But later, in 1943, they were collected and brought out under the title Il Volga nasce in Europa (The Volga Rises in Europe). Also, this experience provided the basis for his two most famous books, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949).

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This journal/diary is worth the reading for the purpose of Curzio Malaparte's habit of howling with the dogs in the middle of the night. Malaparte had the talent to be in the right place with the correct people. For one, he's a remarkable prose stylist. And two, his observations of people around him are descriptive like a fine meal. His comment on Camus is of great interest. Camus had a dislike for Malaparte, what I suspect is due that he was once (or still?) a Fascist. Malaparte is sort of a Tom Ripley character who switches sides like one changes their overcoat. His very nature and position in culture are one of a big question, but also such a fascinating character.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Italy is a country of slaves. A country of men continuously exposed, day and night, to the worst violence of the police, the judiciary, and informers. . . What does it matter if the Italian is, individually, a free man? He can think inwardly what he wants: in reality he is a slave, both of the state and of other Italians. If he doesn’t have powerful friends in high places, he is at the mercy of the police, of the spite and jealousy of his neighbors, of the weakness and cowardice of the state judiciary, of the subjection of the last mentioned to the executive and to the parties. I was arrested eleven times in twenty years; there is nowhere in Italy I can sleep easy." —Malaparte

Curzio Malaparte left his native Italy at 16 to fight alongside the French against the Germans during World War I. He joined in 1914 and stayed in France until 1933, when he returned to Italy and, between stints in jail for his writings, served in the Italian Resistance against Mussolini before and during World War II. In 1947, Malaparte returned to Paris, eager to rekindle his lost acquaintances and fond memories. The memories are easily evoked; the friendships not so much, eyed suspiciously as he is because his return to Italy coincided with Italy and Germany forming an alliance, followed by a declaration of war against France.

The diary entries are expansive and detailed, documenting his contemporary Parisian days and nights as well as his memories of before ‘33, memories riven by distinct generational differences he detects between the veterans of each war. These are his memories of “simple people,” more direct and less pretentious than their contemporary bourgeois counterparts. In his diaries, conversations of the night before are recalled, and the words, gestures, dress, décor, and ambience are recorded with such precision as to arouse suspicions of enhanced rather than exact veracity. As a raconteur, the pictures and ideas Malaparte evoke make him an engaged witness.

His habit of seamlessly segueing from conversation, to observation about the conversation, to generalized observations regarding the topic of conversation reminds me of Knausgaard during the many meditative explorations that make up My Struggle. Malaparte’s eye is as prone to harsh judgment as it is to effusive praise, his likes and dislikes asserted with equal vigor.

But all diary entries to not hail from Olympian heights. Malaparte is his own comic relief, as well, indulging readers to revelations of his treasured habit of barking to the neighborhood dogs. At night. For hours on end. In France, this sort of thing is generally tolerated, but not so in Switzerland, where he (briefly) vacations. In the following passage, I can only hear the policeman’s voice as Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau:

Yesterday evening, having just arrived in the little inn Pas de l’Ours, which is hidden away in the pine forest overlooking Crans, I called out to the dogs in the vicinity. I went out on the terrace and began to bark. And the dogs immediately responded, from near and far, through the night dimly illuminated by a slim crescent moon. I always do the same thing when I arrive in a new place. I become acquainted with the dogs in the vicinity. I don’t do any harm. But this morning I received a visit from the Crans police, who asked me to stop barking at night.
“You are not a dog, monsieur.”
“I like barking with the dogs, at night. I’m not doing any harm.”
“Such things are not done in Switzerland, monsieur. The regulations prohibit it.”
“Thank you. I won’t do it anymore. But I won’t stay in Switzerland, I’ll return to France. There you can bark at night all you want.”
“I’m sorry, monsieur. Foreigners very much enjoy themselves in Switzerland. It’s just that they don’t bark at night. I believe you are the first.”
“I shall return to France, where foreigners can bark as much as they like.”
“I do not doubt it, monsieur. France is a country of loose morals.”
“To bark at night is not to have loose morals.”
“It begins with barking, monsieur, and finishes with biting. The Swiss don’t like being bitten”
I won’t stay in Switzerland. I’ll leave tomorrow. I don’t like countries where you can’t even bark at night. I like free countries.

Later, he explains that he tried talking in dog language to cats, but “the cats didn’t want me to, and insulted me.”

Malaparte of course records far more than his exchanges with the police regarding his barking, and his insights are vivid, well-described, and related with an enthusiasm for intelligent conversation. It doesn’t take agreeing with his every pronouncement to enjoy the camaraderie and earnestness found here.

[Poptartk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a conundrum. I chose it because I'm a fan of diaries and also of Paris—win-win, right? Well, kinda. The guy is a remarkable storyteller. When he tells a story, such as the one about the blind boy and his blind companion in the Tuileries or the stunning account of the grand ball that closes the book, he has no equal. But most of the book is a lot of navel gazing—how the French, whom he claims repeatedly to love, can't seem to get it in their thick skulls that he was not a collaborator in WWII but a resistant; how much he hates Descartes for his cruelty, which his beloved French have embraced full bore (according to him); how his old Parisian friends and acquaintances are giving him cold, sidelong glances at pretty much every dinner party he attends, and he seems to attend one every night... It goes on and on. Probably the biggest head-scratcher (but probably the most humorous aspect of the book) is his penchant for barking along with the local dogs every night, and his high dudgeon when anyone complains about it...

My husband tells me I should have read his "memoir" Kaputt before tackling this one. I guess I put the Cartesian before the horse? Heh.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no doubt a great deal of room indeed for us to speculate, should we happen to be so inclined, as to what motive or motives may have brought Curzio Malaparte to Paris in 1947. If Malaparte himself expends some considerable effort trying to frame things in a particular way, we may have all the more reason to intuit a suppressed dimension. Flying over Avignon in the company of the great Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini—as detailed in what is purported to be a “diary” entry dated June 30th, 1947, the first such entry in the book DIARY OF A FOREIGNER IN PARIS—Malaparte presents himself indulging in an encompassing overview appropriate to the aerial vantage: “I was sixteen years old in 1914 when I came to live in the Palais des Papes in Avignon. I had left behind the Collegio Cicognini, in Prato, sight of my classical education; I’d crossed the border on foot, at Ventimiglia, and the French gendarmes had sent me to a tavern in Menton-Garavan, the Mère aux Bouchons, where some wounded French soldiers offered me food and drink. It was my first encounter with France. I was a pale, frail, and timid child, and France served as my mother. She embraced me as a mother embraces her son.” It paints a pretty picture. Too much so? Probably, sure, though this is par for the course, largely beside the point. The rhapsodic mode and tone of self-mythologizing poetical reverie continue. Safely arrived in Paris and ensconced in his temporary living quarters, having slept his first sound sleep in (so he says) fourteen years and with a “cool breeze blowing from the Bois de Boulogne,” Malaparte appraises the cityscape from his window: “How young the war was then! How pink then were the French faces against the blue horizon. How sad Paris was the morning of my departure. Sad to see me leave, this great pink maiden and blue horizon that was Paris in June 1918. Paris was twenty years old then, like me. It hasn’t aged.” What is one to say? Obviously Malaparte is inclined to lay it on a bit thick, though this is not to say that we should read him as though he's entirely earnest, as if it were a matter of his taking these matter deadly serious. The edition of DIARY OF A FOREIGNER IN PARIS brought out by New York Review Books this past May is a curiosity from an editorial standpoint, translation and editorial responsibilities both taken on by Stephen Twilley, who has found himself working from two broadly variant editions in different languages—Italian and French, the two languages in which the manuscripts were originally composed by the author in something of a random sort of a way—without access to the original manuscripts or support from the Malaparte estate. The title of the book is misleading in any language; the so-called ‘diaries’ are typical of their author’s modus operandi, as they feature Malaparte himself as the protagonist and narrator, though clearly not in a context where “facts” are a primary concern. By the time of his arrival in Paris and the commencement of the work we find collected in the form it currently takes, Malaparte had already published numerous works of fiction which secured his international renown and which featured himself as the star, all of them famous for prodigious invention and the difficult-to-credit conduct of the author’s literary avatar. The “diaries,” spanning the years 1947 and 1948, demand to be read as a continuation of the earlier practice, clearly being posterity-minded and set on “getting the record straight” no matter how much further distortion this "straightening" might require. In 1947, Malaparte is not especially happy with the manner in which he is received. He detects in François Mauriac’s reception “a hint of animosity, of repulsion, of dislike.” Others will consistently present as similarly cool or even outright hostile, the exceedingly chic Albert Camus among them. When a woman in the street is kind to him, even vaguely affectionate, he finds it amusing, as it indicates that this woman is simply too unworldly to have divined from his accent that Malaparte is Italian. Writing about a discussion, shortly after his arrival in Paris, with Italian Ambassador Quaroni, Malaparte, already sensing a general and pervasive atmosphere of passive-aggressive rebuke, vents some of his frustration to the diplomat: “it’s even quite amusing to see how much the French consider me a collaborator. At times I have the desire to respond forcefully, to ask what certain people’s Resistance really consisted of.” Can Malaparte actually be credulous in wondering why he is considered a collaborator? Though he would fall in and out of favour, the man was at times a major Italian fascist of record, associated with if not exactly a friend to none other than Benito Mussolini. Malaparte’s tendency is to seek to establish his own Resistance bonafides by explaining to interlocutors that before and during the war he was arrested repeatedly, spent some time imprisoned in Rome, and was confined for five years to isolated house arrest on the island of Lipari. Readers of Malaparte’s KAPUTT (’44) are aware of the frequency with which the author likes to present himself insulting powerful people in the most recklessly bold manner imaginable. Hardly emblematic of some sort of commitment to direct action or legitimate Resistance, it appear to testify far more to caprice and a curious spirit of corrosive perversity. If the author of the highly-mediated DIARY OF A FOREIGNER IN PARIS is trying to settle a number of scores in the processes of establishing himself as a staunch highly-cultured individualist who would in any geopolitical context invariably find himself more resister than collaborator, there can be no denying that he is, whatever ancillary reservations we might have, lively company. It is difficult to gauge where and to what extent Malaparte is most calculatedly pulling the wool over our eyes, but some key bits of evidence enter the frame by way of endnotes provided by the aforementioned Stephen Twilley. For example, when Malaparte makes the claim that he is leaving (of left) for Chamonix at the end of 1947 in hopes of enjoying a change of scenery, Twilley provides us with evidence that the author was in fact apparently extremely concerned about the immediate peril he might find himself in, even in Paris, if the Italian Communist Party were to win, as expected, a “resounding victory” in the 1948 national elections. Twilley: “One day he considered the possibility of fleeing on skis, if they come to arrest him, and another day, more pessimistic, he foresees the moment in which ‘we will hear the bell toll, a man will enter and before we can breathe a word he will slaughter us like goats.’” Naturally, none of this business is touched upon whatsoever in the “diaries” themselves. It might also hint at an alternative answer to the rhetorical question I posed at the outset (quid Paris?). The trip to Chamonix does, however, provide us with one of the most amusing anecdotes encapsulating the wry perversity of our author’s character: enjoying a day of skiing at Le Brévent, Malaparte insists, despite his utter lack of experience and total ineptitude, on tackling a ridiculously challenging slope, concluding the tale by boasting that he accomplished the undertaking in two-hours and forty-five minutes despite everybody close to him having attempted to prevent him from taking on the mad challenge. “For the Kandahar, the record is two minutes and twelve seconds. Yes, but they were skiers. And finally, why not?” As for Malaparte’s perverse tendency to rudely provoke (or at least depict himself doing so) men of status and power, late in DIARY OF A FOREIGNER IN PARIS we finally get to enjoy the author’s account of his first encounter with Mussolini, before whom he had been called in the early days of the dictator’s assent for comments he had apparently made in a café to the effect that Mussolini always wears ugly ties. Given a stern warning and in the process of taking his leave, Malaparte claims to have stopped in his tracks, turned around, and told Mussolini that he happened to be wearing an ugly tie at that very moment, a provocation which apparently caused the dictator to laugh (as Malaparte’s outrageous statements so regularly cause their targets to do, at least in his books). As for the grievance I have early quoted Malaparte communicating to Quaroni, the Italian Ambassador, we may also be inclined to acknowledge that our author has a point, however dubious his own claims to having been a resister of the fascists. Any given one of the eminent and cultured gentlemen who have scorned Malaparte in Paris: of what indeed did these men’s actual so-called Resistances materially consist? It is certainly not erroneous to argue that most of the French intelligentsia failed to meaningfully contribute to the Resistance. Camus would be one such example, and there is probably some legitimacy to the intimation that he and others in kind have more or less become humourless Resistance faddists without having legitimately earned their self-satisfied contempt. Much of DIARY OF A FOREIGNER IN PARIS consists of lengthy disquisitions on France and Europe in their tenuous postwar contexts, Malaparte attempting to construct something like a master narrative that grounds him in the historical moment and conceptualizes the horizon of futurity. He remains a canny if cantankerous observer, and if his inflexible conception of the broad field he assays is not altogether satisfactory, doubtlessly compromised by its rigidity and the traces of personal prejudice, it is always fascinating to read. If Malaparte overdoes his insistence on the beholdenness of the French and of Frenchness to clinical, hyper-rational Cartesianism, he seems all too trenchant in his assessment of a certain species of factionalism or sectarianism, precisely the tendency on the wrong end of which he has found himself. It is very much a tendency of the French demimonde, certainly extending from the intercine schisms of the 1930s to those of May ’68 and beyond (those latter belonging to the horizon of Malaparte’s futurity). Early in the book, from an entry dated the first of September, 1947, Malaparte waxes prophetic in reflecting upon a recent stroll in the Place de la Concorde: the piazza, he believes, is one “at an extreme limit of a civilization. On the far side of that frontier is democracy, the Republic, bad taste, confusion.” It is chilling to me to be reading these words in the year 2020, contemporary public life taking the form as it now does of an advanced and accelerated condition of atomization within a context of information warfare and woefully vulgarized public discourse. Malaparte’s perversity and caprice are, I believe, part of an experience of conditional groundlessness in a desperate search for re-asserted ground. History inspires all that is rhapsodic in this lyrical writer, but it also presents itself as the fundamental plane of immanence productive of all disaster and all human bondage, a notion given crisp form when Malaparte considers the principle of “Das Da” fielded by Kafka. Malaparte would appear to believe that he is a resister because he is an artist and an individual. If his work has depended on his ability to get close to powerful people it has likewise depended on his incredible capacity to hurl abuses at them. “Men hate the freedom of individuals, especially the freedom of writers. Men hate writers. Especially those capable of defending their freedom with their own strength alone. I did not ask anyone to die for me, and if someone has died for me as well, I have no reason to be grateful to him. If someone believed in good faith to have died for me as well, that makes me smile about human illusions, about how easy it is for someone to deceive himself that he has died for something or for someone.” Malaparte believes that Sartre represents little more than a petit bourgeois bohemian style, dissipated and unkempt, even if in later looking at Charles Du Bos's considerations of ALL’S WELL THAT END’S WELL in his (Du Bos’s) private journals, Malaparte clearly fails to make the obvious connection to existential philosophy. When he argues that the current epoch is one in which “intelligence’s cruelty and morbidity are enormous,” our author is sly enough to note in passing that this is part of a tendency to which he very much contributes, but it is shortly thereafter André Gide who is singled out as the “high priest of a religion whose sacrificial altars are at Dachau.” Malaparte has praise for those in France able to think for themselves, able to operate outside of the sectarian arena, but those things for which he maintains especially high regard belong to the world of aesthetics…an aesthetics in and of history. Malaparte detects the origins of his own literary method in Chateaubriand and he has nothing but praise for the actress Véra Korène, performing Racine at the Théâtre-Français: “the only one, surrounded by the poor, embarrassed, insecure, and fearful Paris public of 1947, to bear the message of French tenderness, which is the only still valid message of France’s greatness.” I have written elsewhere about the quality of lyricism in Malaparte, noting that it always has to do with either the natural world or, perversely, human indignities of a truly hideous nature. In his Introduction to DIARY OF A FOREIGNER IN PARIS, Edmund White quotes numerous lovely passages of Malaparte’s pertaining to the sky, and I immediately recalled that I had quoted similar poetic, metaphor-steeped passages concerning the sky when writing about KAPUTT earlier this summer. Perhaps the most remarkable such passage in DIARY OF A FOREIGNER IN PARIS stands out for framing this particular aestheticized domain within the context of a history of Eurpoean (especially French) aesthetics: “A sky full of green and blue water, a Manet sky in places. Oh, but did Manet go so far inside this Paris sky as to be able to see the invisible pink and green and yellow that is mixed in with the visible blue? Courbet flew through the Lazio sky like an angel. Like one of those Etruscan angels that flew through the Roman sky to watch over the Holy City. Courbet drew his landscapes with a pencil, and there was pink, green, and yellow in his gray pencil, in his black pencil. And Manet’s blacks, his Goya-esque blacks that, in his Île-de-France landscapes, so strangely depend on the greens and pinks. The whole Rive Gauche retains the memory of these blues, these greens, and these pinks that were the colors of eighteenth-century Paris, the colors of Watteau and Greuze.”

[Danny Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curzio Malaparte, pseudoniem van Kurt Erich Suckert was een Italiaanse schrijver en oorlogscorrespondent. Vanaf 1925 gebruikte Malaparte het pseudoniem waaronder hij bekend werd. Het betekent: de slechte kant van iemand, en is een soort van antoniem van Bonaparte.

De voorbije week las ik zijn ‘Dagboek van een vreemdeling in Parijs’, dat begint in 1947. In het dagboek beschrijft Malaparte zijn wederwaardigheden als hij na zijn ‘ballingschap’ in Italië het naoorlogse Parijs bezoekt. Het is vooral een publieke rechtvaardiging van zijn persoon – zijn dagboek was voor publicatie bestemd, alhoewel het pas postuum verscheen in 1966 – want hij werd voor collaborateur aangezien vanwege zijn betrokkenheid bij het fascisme. Malapartes dagboek laat zich lezen als een opgestoken middelvinger naar degenen die hem met wantrouwen bejegenen, ook in zijn geliefde Frankrijk. Zo beschrijft hij Albert Camus met de humor van een paljas als een haatdragende man die alles en iedereen wil laten fusilleren die in zijn ogen fout is geweest in de oorlog.

Het dagboek leest niet zo vlot omdat hij op enkele jaren tijd honderden mensen frequenteert, bekenden en minder bekenden uit de diplomatieke en de culturele wereld. Het boek is vooral interessant voor tijdgenoten, maar voor wie het driekwart eeuw later leest vergt het een inspanning om bij de les te blijven.

Ga ik Malaparte afzweren? Neen hoor. Hier ligt al klaar: ‘De Wolga ontspringt in Europa’ dat recent verscheen. Het is een mythisch reisverslag langs de wreedheid van de Tweede Wereldoorlog.

[C.L.N. · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a quote from Pulp Fiction that goes, "Just because you are a character doesn't mean that you have character." I fear that the more so-called 'honest' Malaparte is, that the more his writing shows him to be a character. In a novel, honesty becomes a formal device. By half-way through this 'honest work', it becomes clear that Malaparte is at his best the more fictional his circumstances are. When the situation is non-fictional, he seems bitter and self-absorbed. When he is doing something odd, such as barking at dogs, the bitterness and self-absorption are still present, but it becomes an endearing limitation on a man caught between many things, attempting to speak of them all at once.

[Karel Van Assche · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fijn te lezen in Parijs (en Gent).
Maar zoals vaak geldt bij de dagboeken van die intelligente, maar opstandige en miskende schrijvers (ik denk nu aan Boelgakov), kwam Malaparte me in deze notities voor als een misnoegd, wrevelig, zelfzuchtig en zelfs flets personage. Hij voelt zich onderkend, onbegrepen en vervolgd door de "massacultuur".
Hij uit met momenten ideeën die naar fascisme neigen, ook al benadrukt hij nog zo een verzetsstrijder (geweest) te zijn en verduidelijkt hij vaak zijn afschuw voor alle regimes. Hij denkt geobsedeerd na over macht en cultuur, de "ziekte" en "genezing" van volkeren, overheersing en subordinatie - allemaal het gevolg van een overmatige intellectualisering van de geschiedenis en een hardvochtigheid tegenover de politiek van zijn tijd.
Hij schrijft nog steeds heel schoon, is nog altijd grappig, hij kende zoveel mensen met bekende namen (lunch met Orson Welles, ontmoeting met Sartre, Mauriac, Camus en wie nog niet), maar daarvoor hoeven we hem zijn soms gevaarlijke opvattingen niet minder kwalijk te nemen.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

essentially a fascist, Malaparte is a much better writer than he is a thinker. his post-war (his side lost, of course) woe-is-unto-me schtick is a bit grating here, but again, Malaparte knows his way around sentences and images. Worth reading for the righteously indignant Camus episode alone.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn’t Malaparte’s best book but it’s definitely worth reading. Only Malaparte can make prejudice and drunk-uncle opinions seem charming.

[Philip Girvan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at France in the months following Liberation through the eyes of a most curious narrator: one whose existence is very much in peril particularly if he chooses to resume living in Italy.

The diarist’s love for France is clear as his discomfort with emerging postwar norms and mores. Malaparte self identifies as a Marxist but is contemptuous of the new “Marxist race” that now dominates Europe. Some of the best passages include a critique of Descartes — “a catastrophe for France, that Cartesianism is France’s weakness. It has robbed the French of all naturalness, all spontaneity, all imagination; made them a people of reasoners, dry, arid, without imagination, without instincts, a prey to reason” (133-34); observations on the nature of French feminine beauty and French women (217-220); and, quoting Chateaubriand, his note that the French love equality more than liberty and adds that equality and tyranny are secretly connected (222).

Other entries that I particularly enjoyed include are the retelling of the red Spaniards captured in Finland (86-97); a commentary on what he describes as FDR’s “madness” in delivering Eastern Europe to Stalin (107); and the rise of a unique new politics: “To bear all the suffering of the human race is not their mission — it’s their politics. This political type, exploiters of the suffering of the human race, is completely new. It’s origin is Anglo-Saxon: English yesterday, American today” (225-26).

Dogs figure prominently throughout the diary. Malaparte frequently spends his evenings on a balcony howling with the dogs of Paris. These he numbers as his closest companions. A diary entry on page 126 refers to the man forced to eat his dog during siege of Paris (1870) who lamented as he ate, “if only poor Fido were here, how happy he would be!”.

The diary is likely incomplete and some of chronology is uncertain. Still it remains a valuable document.

[Matthew Binder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malaparte's a terrific writer and some of the sections in this work are positively wonderful. That said -there are a few terribly boring parts that I'm sure he would've edited out had he been alive when this went to print. A lot of the fun is him gossiping about his contemporaries.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those who've read Kaput and The Skin, this volume may seem an afterthought, an addendum. However, it is the same ever-canny author of the earlier essential books.

It's hard to attribute a single position let alone a truth, political or aesthetic or otherwise, to Malaparte, but it's always a fun ride. I was especially struck by his remarks about Virgil, about his approach to nature being essentially Gallic rather than Latin, and his insistence that the French were a Cartesian people, that they embraced a logic that is cold and distant. Many such remarks recur, remarks more intuitive rather than academic, and for that reason insightful and refreshing. He possesses an aesthetic rather than an ethical position (to borrow distinctions Kirkegaard mapped in Either/Or). You can never pin him down. No wonder Albert Camus seemed to hate him (as Malaparte reports).

[Chetty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un journal contenant des critiques très justes et pertinentes sur la France, l'Italie, l'Europe, les idéologies d'après-guerre, celles-ci complétées de diners et autres souvenirs parisiens avec des personnalité de l'époque. C'est drôle ce qu'il aime aboyer notre Malaparte (et ce n'est pas une façon de parler)!

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t find this particularly enjoyable, there were amusing parts, primarily when he describes his barking with the dogs - especially the conversation with the Swiss policeman who asks him to desist.

But overall I just found it tedious and not enlightening. Compared to the Goncourt Journals, another diary set in Paris it is dull.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would recommend this to anyone who has ever lived in a new, foreign country—specifically, France. Malaparte has such a powerful command of prose. Surprisingly humorous as well—from his barking with dogs to his raging hatred for Descartes.

[Olga Vannucci · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not an easy task
To view a war in hindsight.
Who was wrong, who was right?
Depends on who you ask.

[WillemC · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5
Malaparte is op zijn best wanneer hij, zoals in de meerderheid van dit dagboek, anekdotes vertelt. Andere delen zijn echter wat te wisselvallig, met soms oeverloos intellectueel gezever (bv.: is Racine of Corneille nu de meeste Franse auteur? Het verschil tussen Spaanse, Franse en Italiaanse christendom? ...).

[Gust P · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 stars

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really nice collection of stories taken during the beginning of the fabrication of the resistance myth. Worth it for another tale of de Foxa in Finland, alone.