BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

Camping in the Bush

The greatest loss in reading a mediocre book these days is the time one has wasted that might have been devoted to worthwhile volumes. Recently I interrupted both the Jowitt study of the Alger Hiss Case and Kurt Singer's Men in the Trojan Horse to read Curzio Malaparte's story of war torn Italy called simply The Skin for no better reason than I'd heard the author had taken a couple of ugly swings at homosexuality in general. Perhaps my attitude was belligerent from the beginning, but had I picked up The Skin with no previous comment, I'm sure I'd still have little praise for it. I read Mr. Malaparte's Kaputt in 1947 and though it was said to be good by some fairly intelligent souls, I didn't like it either. Traits of the author I had disliked mildly in Kaputt, stood out mercilessly in The Skin.

In the first place Mr. Malaparte has failed to be as objective as he should have been in treating a subiect as important as the liberation of Italy by the U. S. Army. Then too, Mr. Malaparte's tastes seem to run to the sensational, the grotesque and even the macabre, the employment of which to support his particular opinions makes for something less than factual reporting, which I gathered from the blurbs on the jacket was his primary purpose. Actually, as one improbable tale is reeled off after another, one begins to wonder after 200 pages if Mr. Malaparte isn't the favored contender for today's titles of the incomparable Baron Munchausen.

To give you a mild example, Mr. Malaparte confesses twice that the American army smells like a blond woman. Ignoring the obvious implications of that, and even if it were true, I could not help speculating on the blond women of his acquaintance.

Next, still by way of example, Mr. Malaparte tells us only prostitutes gave themselves to the Nazis, whereas with the advent of G.I. Joe, great numbers of heretofore good women, completely fascinated with so much boyish American charm, capitulated virtue and honor without a flinch. Spam, cigarettes and chewing gum apparently had little to do with it. And how the author dotes on the picture of what might have happened to American women had the Japanese won the war, which to me was not only uncalled for but in very poor taste. Later, in describing the eruption of Vesuvius in 1944, he seems delighted to find American soldiers as dirty, dishevelled, and terrified as the average Neopolitan in the path of destruction.

Add this resentment, and more, to descriptions of the eating of a human hand, (underdone), crucified Jews in Russia, a fish baked to look like a fifteen year old girl and the actual thickness of a corpse rolled out thin by a tank, and even Mr. Malaparte's Penny Dreadfuls begin to pall on the imagination.

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