First published 2014
Walter Murch discovers Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte through an unexpected reference in a cosmology book. The strange imagery leads him to Kaputt, Malaparte's autobiographical novel from World War II's Eastern Front. Malaparte had been exiled by Mussolini for attacking totalitarianism, then sent as a war correspondent for Corriere della Sera in 1941. His dispatches from three years of frontline reporting were suppressed by the Italian government but struck readers as brutally authentic portraits of war's devastation. Murch, renowned as a film editor skilled in converting written words into visual and auditory language, begins his own translation project. He works through Malaparte's dense wartime writings, transforming many of the complex stories into prose and blank verse poems. The adaptation process reveals both the intricacy of the original material and Murch's unique perspective as someone who understands multiple forms of storytelling. The finished work combines Malaparte's raw wartime observations with Murch's cinematic sensibility, creating something that bridges journalism, literature, and poetry while preserving the stark reality of the original dispatches.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Italy, Eastern Front
Period: World War II
176 pages · Paperback · Catapult