The Skin (Picador Classics S.)

by Curzio Malaparte

Rachel Kushner (Introduction) and David Moore (Translator)

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Book cover for The Skin

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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.
  • ISBN10 1590176227
  • ISBN13 9781590176221
  • Publish Date 5 November 2013 (first published 2 December 1988)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher The New York Review of Books, Inc
  • Imprint NYRB Classics