Diary of a Foreigner in Paris

In 1947 Curzio Malaparte returned to Paris for the first time in fourteen years. In between, he had been condemned by Mussolini to five years in exile and, on release, repeatedly imprisoned. In his intervals of freedom, he had been dispatched as a journalist to the Eastern Front of World War II, and though many of his reports from the bloodlands of Poland and Ukraine were censored, his experiences there became the basis for his unclassifiable postwar masterpiece and international bestseller, Kaputt. Now, returning to the one country that had always treated him well, the one country he had always loved, he was something of a star, albeit one that shines with a dusky and disturbing light.

The journal he kept while in Paris and continued to maintain on travels in France and Switzerland records a range of meetings with remarkable people -- Cocteau and a dourly unwelcoming Camus among them -- and is full of Malaparte's characteristically barbed reflections on the temper of the time. If France, the country of liberty and culture, was, Malaparte insisted, his spiritual homeland, postwar France, demoralized and moralizing, making up for its disgrace by a fit of existential priggishness, seemed to betray the very spirit of independence that had made her great. But Malaparte was nothing if not a master of irony, and his journal is perfect model of ambiguous reserve as well as humorous self-exposure. There is, for example, Malaparte's curious custom of sitting out at night and barking along with the neighborhood dogs -- dogs, after all, were his only friends when in exile. The French find it puzzling, to say the least; when it comes to Switzerland, it is grounds for prosecution