The Skin

Praise

“An embodiment of Europe’s bad conscience, Malaparte’s voice was one that right-thinking people of every denomination preferred not to hear. That is why this difficult book was so hated and condemned when it first appeared, and remains so well worth reading.” —The New Statesman

“The sordid underclass of the town possess a lust for life and a will to live, and the unbearable becomes bearable – even magnified – for the reader in this beautiful homage to his hometown which Malaparte tinges with the absurd and black humor.” —Vogue Paris 

“In The Skin the war is not yet over, but its conclusion is already decided. The bombs are still falling, but falling now on a different Europe. Yesterday no one had to ask who was the executioner and who the victim. Now, suddenly, good and evil have veiled their faces; the new world is still barely known . . . the person telling the tale is sure of only one thing: he is certain he can be certain of nothing. His ignorance becomes wisdom.” —Milan Kundera

“Malaparte enlarged the art of fiction in more perverse, inventive and darkly liberating ways than one would imagine possible, long before novelists like Philip Roth, Robert Coover, and E. L. Doctorow began using their own and other people’s histories as Play-Doh.” —Gary Indiana

“Surreal, disenchanted, on the edge of amoral, Malaparte broke literary ground for writers from Ryszard Kapuscinski to Joseph Heller.” —Frederika Randall, Wall Street Journal
 
“A skilled guide to the lowest depths of Europe’s inferno.” —Adrian Lyttelton, The Times Literary Supplement
 
“A scrupulous reporter? Probably not. One of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century? Certainly.” —Ian Buruma

Malaparte enlarged the art of fiction in more perverse, inventive and darkly liberating ways than one would imagine possible, long before novelists like Philip Roth, Robert Coover, and E. L. Doctorow began using their own and other people’s histories as Play-Doh.
—Gary Indiana

n cynical, repetitive prose carefully suspended between disgust and delight, Malaparte details the indignities the invading army inflicts on Italy.
—Joshua Craze, Asymptote Journal