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Viva Caporetto! (French)
Viva Caporetto! is the debut work of Curzio Malaparte, and it is the first of its kind to be published in France. In 1921, at the age of 23, Malaparte, then known as Kurt Erich Suckert, had just returned from a year-long stint as a diplomatic attaché in Warsaw, after four years of fighting on the Italian and French fronts during World War I. Decorated for his participation in some of the most significant battles of the Great War on both fronts, including Bligny and Col di Lana, his account in Viva Caporetto! is not a tale of his own heroic deeds, but rather a chronicle of the war experienced by the millions of Italian soldiers, most of them simple infantrymen and peasants, who were sent to the Karst trenches to defend territories they had never even heard of before.
What Viva Caporetto! recounts about the war is the senseless sacrifice of courageous young men, the stupid obstinacy of an incompetent military command, and, above all, the chasm between the horror of the slaughter and the nauseating rhetoric of patriotic propaganda. The young Suckert speaks on behalf of those illiterate soldiers who silently accepted their useless deaths. In defiance of the official propaganda, he chooses Caporetto, the massive retreat of the Italian troops in the face of the advancing Austrian armies in October 1917, as the emblematic moment of the infantryman's heroism and the hope for revenge of a scorned people.
Seized and censored three times between 1921 and 1923, Viva Caporetto! was an explosive indictment of the young Fascist Italy, which was being built upon the memory of a victorious Great War. It wasn't until the late 20th century that this unique and unconventional pamphlet, through which the future Malaparte made his literary debut, was rediscovered in Italy and translated and published in France for the first time.
product information:
| Attribute | Value | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| publisher | Les Belles Lettres (May 17, 2024) | ||||
| publication_date | May 17, 2024 | ||||
| language | French | ||||
| file_size | 1853 KB | ||||
| text_to_speech | Enabled | ||||
| screen_reader | Supported | ||||
| enhanced_typesetting | Enabled | ||||
| word_wise | Not Enabled | ||||
| sticky_notes | On Kindle Scribe | ||||
| print_length | 120 pages | ||||
| page_numbers_source_isbn | 2251310037 | ||||
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