Curzio Malaparte: The cruelty of Literature at CIMA – SoHo Events

By Center for Italian Modern Art

Sep 24  |  Culture

CIMA is thrilled to host a book launch and conversation with the author of “Curzio Malaparte: The cruelty of Literature,” with Franco Baldasso and NYRB translator and novelist Jenny McPhee

Curzio Malaparte is today at the center of an international debate reappraising his work as a key figure of European modernity, rediscovering his books, cinema and theater. The scandals of Malaparte’s biography overshadowed the exceptional versatility of an author famous to architects worldwide for his arresting Casa Malaparte in Capri as well as for his heretic accounts of WWII in bestsellers such as Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949). Beginning with his controversial contribution to fascism and his outstanding reports from the war fronts, Baldasso’s book interprets the cruelty of Malaparte’s literature as a critical response to the collapse of European civilization and the failure of post-WWI revolutionary ideals that ended up fueling totalitarian regimes. In conversation with novelist Jenny McPhee, who translated Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball for NYRB Classics, Baldasso will further discuss the unexplored visual impact of Malaparte’s work: not only his house in Capri created with Adalberto De Libera, but also the rarely screened movie The Forbidden Christ(1951) and his photos as a war correspondent from Ethiopia to Ukraine.

Curzio Malaparte, la letteratura crudele (Carocci, 2019) is the first study on the Italian author to concentrate on his artistic production beyond the scandals of his life as a public intellectual. The book interprets Malaparte’s crucial period 1937-1951 in the context of the tragic failure of totalitarian regimes to establish new political religions. The clash between modern technology and old humanist worldviews takes central stage in Malaparte’s unique testimony of the downfall of European civilization, from literature to cinema.

Franco Baldasso is Assistant Professor and Director of the Italian Program at Bard College, NY. He is the 2019 Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies from the American Academy in Rome. His main research interests are 20^th century literature, art and intellectual history, the complex relations between Fascism and Modernism, and the idea of the Mediterranean in modern aesthetics. He authored a book on Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Bologna 2007) and the volume Curzio Malaparte, la letteratura crudele. Kaputt, La pelle e la caduta della civiltà europea (Carocci, 2019). He is currently revising a new manuscript titled: “Against Redemption: Literary Dissent during the Transition from Fascism to Democracy in Italy.”

Jenny McPhee is the Director of the Center for Applied Liberal Arts at NYU’s School of Professional Studies where she is a Clinical Assistant Professor teaching in the MS in Translation. She is the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon, and she co-authored Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits. Her translations from the Italian include books by the authors Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi, Curzio Malaparte, Anna Maria Ortese, Paolo Maurensig, and Pope John Paul II. She recently taught literary translation at Princeton University as a visiting lecturer.

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