The chameleonic Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) wore many guises, but it’s as a writer that he is best remembered, so those tackling Maurizio Serra’s impressive Malaparte: A Biography should have read at least Kaputt (1944), the book that is widely considered his masterpiece.1 Having done so would have been more likely in France, where Malaparte is better known than in the United States and where this biography was first published in 2011 as Malaparte, vies et légendes (“Malaparte, Lives and Legends,” a better title) in response to a proposal by a French publisher. It won the Goncourt prize for biography that year.

Malaparte was a notorious narcissist, so I’ll begin by talking about myself…