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Noshed on Diary of a Foreigner in Paris by Curzio Malaparte, one of the great bullshitters of the 20th century. Hell of a writer, but you don’t have to believe a word he says. The Italian author was a fascist who was later imprisoned by Mussolini. He says it was because he made fun of the dictator’s ties and/or was really anti-fascist. In fact one of his prison sentences was for embezzling public funds. He also did time for insulting a war hero—whose glowing biography he had written himself. The war hero didn’t like it, so he talked trash about the war hero.

Malaparte was a war correspondent who produced riveting, unreliable reportage. You wonder what percentage of it is true. There’s a story in another book of his, Skin, about how starving Italians served their American guests a boiled girl in mayonnaise, with a fish tail attached, claiming she was a mermaid. That modernist house in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (in the news as its star, Michel Piccoli, died recently) was Malaparte’s. (If he’d been alive for the shoot, the claims he could’ve made about Brigitte Bardot.) He was a globe-trotting, high-living, womanizing raconteur, which is how a lot of men see themselves, except that he really was that. The cover of the NYRB Classics edition of his Diary is his photograph, taken by Robert Doisneau. In it he is wearing a mask (over his eyes), and there’s another mask on his cluttered desk. He was upfront about his many faces, and was hurt when people took offense.

Diary begins in 1947, when he returns to Paris a star, having reinvented himself as being anti-fascist all along. In postwar Paris he dined with aristocrats and artists—Cocteau, Gide, Malraux—and worked on his novel, The Kremlin Ball (also on NYRB Classics), which he never finished. What for, all his books of reportage were novels. In Diary he writes about meeting Albert Camus, whose novels The Stranger and The Plague he professed to admire. Camus disappointed him by not buying his bullshit. Basically he said Malaparte should be shot. And Malaparte was hurt. How not-fun and unsophisticated of Camus, how judgmental and mean. I love Albert Camus, as a writer and as a human being.

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On the highest single-day surge in covid cases due to the late transmission of data: