"Malaparte may just be the original postmodernist, at least as far as genre-crossing is concerned...A head-swirling kaleidoscope that, though fictional, is never for a moment fictitious." –
Kirkus Review "Malaparte enlarged the art of fiction in more perverse, inventive, and darkly liberating ways than one would imagine possible, long before novelists like Philip Roth, Robert Coover, and E. L. Doctorow began using their own and other people's histories as Play-Doh." –Gary Indiana
"Surreal, disenchanted, on the edge of amoral, Malaparte broke literary ground for writers from Ryszard Kapuscinski to Joseph Heller." –Frederika Randall,
The Wall Street Journal "A scrupulous reporter? Probably not. One of the most remarkable writers of the 20twentieth century? Certainly." –Ian Buruma