The Skin

The Skin (1949) is Curzio Malaparte’s unsettling and provocative novel set in Naples during the Allied occupation at the end of World War II. Blending memoir and fiction, the book portrays a devastated city where survival is bought at the price of dignity, morality, and even humanity. Through the narrator’s encounters with soldiers, black marketeers, aristocrats, and desperate civilians, Malaparte depicts a world stripped bare—where the “skin” is the last fragile barrier between civilization and barbarism. At once shocking, satirical, and deeply tragic, the novel exposes the moral corruption and disintegration of Europe in the aftermath of war.