Malraux
A Life
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Writer, publisher, war hero, French government minister, André Malraux was renowned as a Renaissance man of the twentieth century. Now, Olivier Todd–author of the acclaimed biography Albert Camus–gives us this life, in which fact competes dramatically with his subject’s previously little-known mythomania.
We see the adventurous young Malraux move from 1920s literary Paris to colonial Cambodia, Cochin China, and Spain in its civil war. Todd charts the thrilling exploits that would inspire such novels as Man’s Fate, but, just as fascinating, he also traces Malraux’s lifelong pattern of lies: claiming friendship with Mao, he was called to tutor Nixon, despite having met the Great Helmsman only once; a minor injury becomes in recollections a near-mortal battlefield wound; stories of heroism in the French Resistance omit to mention that Malraux joined up just a few weeks before the Allied landings.
With meticulous research, Todd separates myth from reality to throw light on a brilliant con man who would become a national hero, but he also lets us see Malraux’s genuine achievements as both writer and man of action. His real life and the one he embroidered come together in this superb biography to reveal how Malraux, the protean genius, became his own greatest character.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whether or not you enjoy this oh-so-French portrait of the oh-so-French novelist, art historian and Gaullist politician will depend on how opinionated you think a biography should be. Throughout his life, Andr Malraux (1901 1976) tended to exaggerate his achievements: during the Spanish Civil War, in the Resistance and as a minister in de Gaulle's postwar governments. But the tone of airy superiority assumed by Todd (Albert Camus) can be grating, as he fact-checks Malraux's novels do we really care that he knew less about China than he pretended to in Man's Fate? and scolds his subject for paying a cordial visit to the Soviet Union in 1934, when in fact the writer was considerably less na ve about Stalinism than many left-wing Europeans. It's undeniable that Todd's opinions are wittily bracing ("despite his pessimism, Malraux falls for utopia"), and his use of the present tense throughout gives the narrative a lively tone, immersing the reader in Malraux's frantic existence. Todd indelibly captures the writer's enormous charisma, exerted in dazzling monologues filled with high-flown phrases in the best French tradition. This is a very personal assessment by an often exasperated admirer who judges Malraux's two greatest achievements as Man's Hope and "his own staggering, rollicking life." 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.
