R J B Bosworth
Renegades, Rebels & Racketeers
Naples 1944 and the Making of Post-War Italy
By Keith Lowe
William Collins 464pp £25
Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) is a quirky figure in the annals of Italian Fascism. An extremist who pushed Mussolini towards declaring himself dictator on 3 January 1925, he had the classic background of bemedalled service in the First World War. Thereafter a writer and journalist, he spurred Mussolini towards revolution in Italy, founding a journal entitled La Conquista dello Stato (‘The Conquest of the State’). By 1933, too individualist to suit Mussolini’s rule, he was relegated to confino, the Fascist punishment of banishment to out-of-the-way places in the south of Italy. It was said that Malaparte’s real sin had been to begin a relationship with the widowed daughter-in-law of Giovanni Agnelli, the wealthy (and patriarchal) founder of Fiat. However, Malaparte soon returned to journalism and in the Second World War became a celebrated war correspondent for Corriere della Sera. In 1944 he punchily portrayed his wartime experiences in Kaputt, a teasingly unreliable memoir which includes a description of a naked Himmler in a sauna bath. When the Allies occupied Italy, Malaparte sloughed off his Fascism and began working for the American army in Naples. In 1949, he sketched a scabrous account of the city’s ‘liberation’ in a novel entitled La Pelle (‘The Skin’), which describes the pressure on the city’s women to satiate the desires of the occupying soldiers.
Malaparte appears in Keith Lowe’s passionate but idiosyncratic book on post-Fascist Naples without much in the way of an introduction. Turning its pages, we discover that Lowe has a deeper sympathy for the Neapolitans of 1943–4 than Malaparte, while sharing his sense of outrage. Chapter ten, containing his own account of the sex trade in the city, is the longest in the book. Lowe reports that around 10 per cent of Neapolitan women were engaged in some form of sex work and that 74 per cent of white and 96 per cent of black GIs slept with Italian women during their military service.
Lowe’s book has a three-part structure. In the first section, archly entitled ‘Beautiful Monsters’, he describes the Allied takeover of the city in 1943–4. He plunges into his narrative with little attempt to set out the historical background or discuss the theory and practice of the Fascist government. Most of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
@StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at.
Stephen Smith - Art of Rebellion
Stephen Smith: Art of Rebellion - Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
literaryreview.co.uk
‘I have fond memories of discussing Lorca and the state of Andalusian theatre with Antonio Banderas as Lauren Bacall sat on the dressing-room couch.’
@henryhitchings on Simon Russell Beale.
Henry Hitchings - The Play’s the Thing
Henry Hitchings: The Play’s the Thing - A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale
literaryreview.co.uk
We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk