“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
“Serra carefully assesses the political twists and turns of Malaparte’s career, analyzing his courtier’s employment of flattery and ridicule with an exactitude that is scintillating.” —John Ganz, The New York Times
“The book celebrates Malaparte as one of the ‘most singular interpreters of a twentieth century whose anxieties live on into our own’ and ‘one of the least decadent and most vitalistic authors in all of literature.’ Its charge is to convince us that, whatever the ‘beautiful souls’ may hold against him, Malaparte is a writer for the ages—especially ours.”
—Thomas Meaney, The New Yorker
“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
“An enormously valuable study of the fascist imagination…An astonishingly accomplished researcher, Serra crawls through mountains of evidence to reconstruct the events of Malaparte’s life.” —Jack Hanson, Defector
“A subtle, incisive and definitive biography . . . provocative and perceptive.”
—John Gray, The New Statesman
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