For about a year, in 2016-17, I wrote weekly entries on things I’d been reading—new books and old books, books of poetry and fiction and philosophy, books about art and music and debt and politics: just whatever I happened to be reading that week. Even when the subjects were new publications, these brief entries, published at hyperallergic.com, were not conceived as reviews, although I tried to include some of the basic information normally found in reviews, and often enough my writing glanced at the books in ways that might have been considered tangential to a conventional review. Lately I’ve been hankering to recommence that project or practice or habit. I’m starting with this, a diary entry about a diary.
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What draws me to Curzio Malaparte is, first of all, the writer’s chosen name, which announces his having taken the bad side. But in the case of his Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, the draw was also a title that conjures the allure of twentieth-century Paris as a haven for outsiders. Written partly in French, partly in Italian in 1947-48, this diary seems to have been kept with publication in mind, or as raw material for one of Malaparte’s autobiographical fictions. This one would have been populated by some of the famous characters of post-war Paris (Camus, Cocteau, Sartre all put in appearances), along with any number of now-forgotten actors, ambassadors, and socialites whose gossip makes the reader feel as much an insider as an outsider can be. So why was the project abandoned? (The diary was first published, in Italian, in 1966, nine years after Malaparte’s death.) I’d like to think he realized that its pages of incoherent rumination on national character, often conceptualized as “race”—does Descartes with his rationalistic philosophy represent the essence of French thinking or its undoing?—were unsalvageable. What’s memorable in Malaparte is crystalline storytelling tinged with cruelty. His anecdotes may not be entirely true but they are, as his countrymen say, ben trovato. Whether based on hearsay or observation, they’re often structured like jokes with punchlines, only the punchlines are chilling, not funny. Like the one from the siege of Paris in 1870, when hunger gripped the city. A man with nothing left to eat finally had to resort to the family dog. “During the meal, seeing the bones of the poor dog mounting on the plates, his master exclaimed in tears, ‘Ah, all those bones… If only poor Fido were here, how happy he would be!’” Or from the Spanish Civil War, the anecdote of the prisoner being walked to his riverside place of execution. “It’s winter, and a freezing cold north wind blows from the Sierra.” The executioners are no more warmly dressed than their prisoner, who curses the icy cold. “One of the Civil Guards says to him, ‘You’re complaining? Think about us, we’ve got to come all the way back!’” Malaparte, too, knew the self-pity of the survivor.
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Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, translated by Stephen Twilley with an introduction by Edmund White (2020), is published by New York Review Books, New York.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.