Kaputt / Curzio Malaparte

Kaputt reading (Curzio Malaparte work first published in Naples in 1944 and reprinted by Gutenberg Galaxy again in a fantastic translation), I have the feeling of visiting an art gallery, a museum (the horror several times) with a series of paintings or scenes. On this visit I stop in front of portraits depicting scenes of geese, put to the sword (or "shot in a wall by members of the SS" as the author imagines), resting on silver trays and quartered potatoes surrounded by bed partners, recalling still lifes and still lifes in the style of French painter Georges Braque.También skies observed Impressionist paintings such as Pierre Auguste Renoir, or bump into surrealism customs of Marc Chagall. What comes to mind Van Gogh to read some metaphors like vigilantes sunflowers Polyphemus with his eye black and blond eyelashes.

I read at the pace that makes the book a slow, deliberate ... and that cadence can clearly obsevar scenes that seem to be framed with the New Objectivity of George Grosz: with this grotesque rotting flesh and spirit, with pictorial chaos is to expose those who benefited from the war, were not other which rulers, soldiers, priests and others. The pillars of society / George Grosz Some scenes depicted in the play are extremely powerful, like the horses of Ladoga, their heads emerging from the lake like chess pieces on a board of ice :

"The next day, when the first patrol sissit with singed hair, their faces black with smoke, walking carefully on the still warm ashes of charred forest, reached the shore of the lake, a horrible and wonderful spectacle grew to their eyes. The lake was like a huge white marble slab on which he placed hundreds of horse heads. They looked clean cut severed by an ax. The heads were all that emerged from the ice crust. All looked toward the shore. In your eyes open flame still burned white terror. At the edge of the shore, a tangle of horses prancing fiercely protruding from the icy prison. "" During the night the north wind dropped. (The wind North down from Murmansk as an angel, screaming, and suddenly the earth dies.) began to make a terrible cold. Suddenly, with its characteristic sound of cracked glass, the water froze. "(For the skeptics, I invite to read a chapter dedicated to this amazing event, taken from the work drunk Time: Does it make sense the universe? the renowned Canadian astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, explaining the phenomenon of supercooling and its relationship with the horses of Ladoga.

I leave the link to this text in the References section).

I have in the retina still the scene that tells the adventure of the boy of thirteen who, after shooting the whole army only against Nazi from an abandoned village, is captured and made available to a soldier to run it. The German captain, in a fit of compassion ephemeral seeing him so young, so macabre decides to play with the child to guess which of your eyes is made of glass: if you hit save the life ... of course it is an ideal game for kids . The boy is right without hesitation and the captain, for such a quick response Leary asked how he found out: "Why is the only one human expression" the kid responds with surprising firmness. There are countless stories that happen in the book. I remember the tenderness of a German couple with two young children. Before the bombing of the British one of the children fell ill as a result of fear, and parents, with admirable fortitude, decide to make a game of that war, making the bombs dropped by British planes on gifts for children. With each outbreak, parents and children shouting for joy. When the planes away children run out into the garden and your gifts are distributed among the grass: a doll there, a wooden horse there ...

It reminds me of Roberto Benigni's film Life is Beautiful, where the protagonist, Guido decides to believe her son Joshua while in a concentration camp that everything is a game where you only win if you is not seen by "snarling" German guards.

Malaparte describes how an entire generation ability was reduced to rubble, as the buildings demolished by bombs; plasma in a magnificent mosaic that made a generation dying to be reborn kaputt and their ashes.

While surfing the Internet I read reviews about the questionable credibility of some events recounted Malaparte in his work, like the horses of Ladoga, in others it accused of fabulist: as in the episode of the child and the glass eye. All I can say about it is that I do not mind at all if what I'm reading what the author actually lived or not, I care a way to tell, the feelings that you get caught, the narrator's ability to tickle the soul that is real literature, and more than I can ask him a book. Curzio Malaparte's literature ... and good.