Bestseiling Nausea

THE SKIN (344 pp.)--Curzio Mala-parte--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

"Our true country," declares Curzio Malaparte in his new book, "is our own skin." By this definition, Signor Malaparte is a redoubtable patriot.

Before 1943, he was the Duce's tame intellectual, a pet journalist of Fascism, who, as special correspondent for Milan's Corriere delta Sera, was fed rich scoops of news on the silver spoon of favoritism. When the war began to turn against the Axis, so did Malaparte's pen. He was punished with brief confinement in a Rome prison, then allowed to retire to a Capri villa; there he was liberated by the Allied forces. Malaparte promptly put all his inside information about high Fascist circles at the disposal of the Allied command, and was rewarded with a commission as liaison officer with the U.S. Fifth Army.

The next year Malaparte fortified his status as an anti-Fascist with the publication of Kaputt (TIME, Nov. 11, 1946), a gruesome collection of anecdotes about Nazi-Fascist cruelty. Kaputt was a sensational bestseller on the Continent, and made Malaparte one of Europe's leading apostles of nausea--a sort of Jean Paul Spillane.

Now, in his second autobiographical account, The Skin, Malaparte has done for his new masters what he did for his old in Kaputt. The treatment is just as popular, too. The Skin has already sold 100,000 copies in Italy, 200,000 in France, 250,000 in Germany, and is a bestseller in Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway and Spain.

Author Malaparte begins his pitch with a sugary invocation of his victims. "The American army," he coos, "[is] the loveliest, the kindest . . . army in the world. . . I like Americans. . . and I proved it a hundred times during the war. . . Their souls are pure, much purer than ours. I like the Americans. . . because they believe that Christ is always on the side of those who are in the right, because they believe that it is a sin to be in the wrong."

Thereupon Malaparte proceeds, with crude but cruel satiric effect, to lead a number of U.S. officers (and indirectly his readers too) on a macabre tour through the gutters of wartime Naples. He shows mothers who sell their children into prostitution; but then, says Malaparte with a smirk, there are also the children who would gladly sell their mothers. He dwells for part of a chapter on a street peopled with twisted female dwarfs, who fed, he asserts gleefully, on the unnatural lusts of the American ranks. Another chapter is concerned with a visit to a shop that sells blonde merkins (pubic wigs). U.S. Negro soldiers, Malaparte explains, like blondes.

A little farther on, Malaparte alleges that there existed during the World War II a "homosexual maquis"--and what's more, he claims, they had a lot to do with winning the war for the Allies. This is somehow connected with the fact that "the love of inverts is, thank God, superior to the sexual feeling of men and women."

On & on he goes, reporting all the horrors he can remember and imagine--a "flag made of human skin" fluttering in the breeze, the rows of crucified Jews he saw on a Ukrainian steppe, the time an Allied general served his guests a boiled child (or was it relly only a fish that looked almost human?).

In sum total, though his horrors and ironies startle and shock, they end up by numbing.

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