Kaputt (novel)

Kaputt is a 1944 autobiographical novel by the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte.

The book was inspired by Malaparte's experiences as a war correspondent at the Eastern Front of World War II. It presents itself as Malaparte's personal witness account of intense violence and cruelty, but the content is largely fictional.

The book was an international success. Already at the publication, several European critics received the book's narrator as a fictionalised author persona, and the book as an attempt from Malaparte to position himself after Italy's defeat and his own past as a fascist sympathiser. When the English translation was published in 1946, Kirkus Reviews received it as a true account and called it "a subtly brilliant piece of writing" where Malaparte is "whipping the sensibilities to a sharp awareness of the degradation of Europe, of the utter collapse of morality, integrity, and so on".

The book was translated into Lithuanian by Tomas Venclova.

• Hope, William (1999). "The narrative contract strained: The problems of narratorial neutrality in Malaparte's Kaputt". The Italianist. 19 (1): 178–192. doi:10.1179/ita.1999.19.1.178.

• Walker, Robert G. (2010). "Malaparte and Literary Strangeness: A Critical Preface to Kaputt". The Sewanee Review. 18 (2): 270–282. doi:10.1353/sew.0.0252. JSTOR 40801276.

• New York Review of Books