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Diary of a Foreigner in Paris (New York Review Books Classics)
Bottom of the pile
16
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
14/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Curzio Malaparte, Stephen Twilley, Edmund White
Publisher:
NYRB Classics
Date:
May 19, 2020
Recording his travels in France and Switzerland, writer and artist Curzio Malaparte encounters famous figures such as Cocteau and Camus and captures the fraught, restless spirit of Paris after the trauma of war.
What The Reviewers Say
Curzio Malaparte, Italian fascist, Maoist, fabulist, dandy, diplomat, dog worshipper, aesthete, journalist, novelist, filmmaker, was a very odd cove.
What is surprising is not the cold shoulders Malaparte kept getting, but that he himself was at first surprised by this reception. His accounts of these many humiliations, which pockmark his diary, are mesmerizing. At times, it seems that the one thing Parisian intellectuals had in common was their distaste for this smooth-talking, shape-shifting Italian.
Malaparte was admired for his journalistic prose; his verite style diary entries are often a poetic portrait of a city trying to rebuild, even as they try to put years of loss, grief, and war trauma behind them and move on. As critical as he is about Italy, he doesn’t hold back his disillusionment about what he experiences in post-war France.
