The Skin by Curzio Malaparte
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Christ Was a Neopolitan

Malaparte was clearly a practical man. He had a sense in which direction the train of history was moving, and he knew at which stops to make transfers or even to reverse direction. In short, Malaporte was a survivor. The Skin is a novelistic memoir of his existential skills - intelligence, political awareness of context, acute insight into motives and unconscious intention, but most of all irony.

The Skin is intensely ironic from its opening sentence referring to the liberation of Naples in 1943 as a “plague” to its closing “It is a shameful thing to win a war.” Malaporte avoids sarcasm by never blaming anyone (which is effectively the same as blaming everyone) for the misery inflicted by not just war but its lingering aftermath. His irony is cool, detached, a sort of Stoic commentary on the inevitability of suffering.

Clearly Malaporte is empathetic with his Italian countrymen as they suffer the physical deprivation and spiritual degradation of defeat. He sees them and reports them in excruciating detail. But his is a sort of empathy without sympathy. His attitude toward the mass pain of Allied occupation is more or less that of an astute philosopher of history: “What else could have been expected?”

Apparently the Catholic Church condemned The Skin, perhaps because of its portrayal of the essential human corruption on which the church is built. But I’m sure that the condemnation was theological as well as political. The book is a profound statement of what it means to be human - the crassness of power, its casual infliction of pain, the vulgarity of those who serve power, and the ultimate falsehoods of idealistic myths. In other words, the world, or at least its human component, is evil at its core. Nothing can save it, certainly not more idealistic myths.

To put this more precisely: fighting for the good results in not better but worse. The implication is that the good cannot be protected by violent action because violence can always be rationalised as in the interests of the good. People lie, mostly to themselves, about why they do what they do. The more educated they are, the more facile the ability to find sufficient fictions to justify sheer stupidity - like participation in war.

This is the positive part of Malaparte’s extreme gnosticism. It is what makes his irony bearable. There are no just causes; there are only interests which are transformed into ideals and used to motivate harm and self-delusion. Perhaps the greatest irony is that this seeming hopelessness is the central principle of Christianity - only love wins. The fact that this principle has been consistently undermined by the churches, cultures, and individuals which claim to be Christian is the paradox at the heart of The Skin. No wonder the Catholic Church was keen to suppress it.

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