The Skin

London & Sydney: Alvin Redman, 1952. Hardcover. Good/No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. The head of the spine is bumped, the fore- edge foxed, as are both paste downs and back end paper; the front end paper missing and the front hinge reinforced with acid free tape.There is also a bookseller's label on the front paste down, Hall's Book Store, cause for nostalgia to baby boomer Melbournians, and finally pp.140 to 154 have a vertical crease which varies in severity. It's a printer's fault and none of it too awful. A clean, tight copy, but obviously used. Second impression. Translated from the Italian (La Pelle) by David Moore. The Skin "begins in 1943, with Allied forces cementing their grip on the devastated city of Naples. The sometime Fascist and ever-resourceful Curzio Malaparte is working with the Americans as a liaison officer. He looks after Colonel Jack Hamilton, "a Christian gentleman . . . an American in the noblest sense of the word," who speaks French and cites the classics and holds his nose as the two men tour the squalid streets of a city in ruins where liberation is only another word for desperation. Veterans of the disbanded Italian army beg for work. A rare specimen from the city's famous aquarium is served up at a ceremonial dinner for high Allied officers. Prostitution is rampant. The smell of death is everywhere. Subtle, cynical, evasive, manipulative, unnerving, always astonishing, Malaparte is a supreme artist of the unreliable, both the product and the prophet of a world gone rotten to the core." (publisher's blurb)