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Malraux: A Life, by Olivier Todd
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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.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #1334015 in eBooks
- Published on: 2007-12-18
- Released on: 2007-12-18
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Hemingway, French writer Andre Malraux once complained, suffers from "delusions of simplicity." In this probing new biography--felicitously translated from the 2001 French original--Todd assures his readers that Malraux (who fought with Hemingway in the Spanish civil war) never approaches simplicity, not even in delusions. Rather, Todd confronts layer upon layer of complexity as he traces the tangled linkages between the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, in the puzzling life of Malraux. Todd's exhaustive research allows him to penetrate Malraux's elaborate personal mythology of phantom exploits in two wars and fantasized influence over the leaders of two continents, discovering not simple dishonesty but rather sophisticated compensation for a fatherless childhood spent in unavailing struggles against Tourette's syndrome. Similarly, in the political obtuseness that mars even Malraux's most brilliant work, Todd discerns not the simple blindness of the ideologue but instead the double vision (at once vatic and myopic) of the artist, for whom reality counts as mere raw material for his imaginative gifts. And most fundamentally, behind Malraux's simple denial of any interest in his own life, Todd descries the never-ending project of embellishing and memorializing fresh adventures for a protean self--now a leftist fellow traveler and now a right-wing Gaullist; now a lover of this woman and now a lover of that one. His deep sympathy for his subject always tethered by unblinking objectivity, Todd delivers the entire enigmatic man. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Dashingly brilliant . . . Marvelously enjoyable . . . Todd, by turns elegant, sarcastic, disdainfully well read, pounces and plays with his hide-and-seek subject, writing in the present tense. The result is delightful reading.”
–Kirkus (starred review)
“Wittily bracing . . . [Todd’s] 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.”
–Publishers Weekly
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Olivier Todd was born in Paris in 1929. Educated at Cambridge and the Sorbonne, he has been a reporter, a columnist, and an editor at Le Nouvel Observateur and L'Express. He has also contributed to The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and Newsweek International, and worked for the BBC and the first French television channel. The author of numerous books–including novels, essay collections, and biographies–Olivier Todd lives in Paris.
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
'Malraux' hovers between hagiography and hatchet job
By Roy E. Perry
Olivier Todd, who lives in Paris, is the author of numerous books--including novels, essay collections, and biographies, such as his highly acclaimed Albert Camus: A Life (Knopf, 1997). In Malraux: A Life, Todd has written another impressively researched biography.
Andre Malraux (1901-1976) was one of the greatest French writers of the 20th century. An autodidact, he was an omnivorous reader, devouring works of literature, history, philosophy, and art as a starving man devours food. A man of action as well as a man of intellect, Malraux was one of those rare individuals whose life combined adventure and creativity.
His works include The Temptation of the West (1926), The Conquerors (1828), The Royal Way (1930), Man's Fate (1934) Days of Wrath (1935), Man's Hope (1938), The Psychology of Art (1947-1949), The Voices of Silence (1953), Anti-Memoirs (1967), and Felled Oaks (1971).
Malraux suffered from Tourette's syndrome, a rare inherited neurological disease characterized by recurrent motor and phonic tics (involuntary muscle spasms and vocalizations). "Malraux forged an exceptional life for himself," writes Todd, "not because of but despite and in opposition to his nervous tics. Like Mozart, Samuel Johnson, Emile Zola, and Franz Kafka, who also had to compromise with their Tourette's syndrome, Malraux overcompensated and dominated his physical difficulties."
A world traveler, Malraux sought adventures to give him grist for his writing mill. Fascinated by the East, he visited Indochina, China, Japan, Russia, and India. He was arrested and almost imprisoned for stealing a bas relief from the temple at Bantai Srey, Cambodia. He fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and against the Nazis in the French resistance. Although not the second Lawrence of Arabia he envisioned himself to be, Malraux was both a man of culture and a man of action.
When Malraux engineered the loan of La Gioconda (the Mona Lisa) to an art gallery in the United States, John F. Kennedy said, "Malraux has revived the ideal of the Renaissance ... a writer, a philosopher, a statesman, and a soldier. He has demonstrated that politics and art, the life of action and the life of thought, the world of events and the world of the imagination are one." Todd comments: "John Kennedy does not believe a word of what he says. But is designed to please Malraux."
Malraux often spoke of himself as "a religious mind without faith," a description that also characterizes Nietzsche. Such a "spirituality" is in no way connected with ecclesiastical orthodoxy; one must understand the phrase not in a metaphysical, but in an aesthetic sense, with a healthy dose of depth psychology thrown in for good measure.
Deeply influenced by Nietzsche's "the death of God" (some would say "the death of the Absolute"), Malraux was troubled by the advance of nihilism and the relativity of cultures. He sallied forth in a quixotic quest for the Absolute (sans deity), first in revolution, then in Art (with a capital "A"). Hence, the title of Claude Tannery's, Malraux: The Absolute Agnostic; or, Metamorphosis as Universal Law (University of Chicago, 1991).
Incidentally, the compiler of the index to Todd's Malraux did a sloppy job. It contains only one reference to "Nietzsche," but he appears numerous times in this volume, virtually in every chapter.
Was Malraux an "existentialist"? Literary pundits disagree. But Malraux consistently made existentialist noises, speaking of the Absurd, contingency, man's solitude, man's fate (death), man's hope (brotherhood), revolution, freedom, and destiny.
Malraux was interested in pataphysics, a school of thought founded by Alfred Jarry, which saw itself as "the science of what is added on top of metaphysics." He was fascinated by all things mysterious: the enigmatic, the irrational, the unreal, the surreal. "What interests me, above all," he said, "is the question 'What can be transmitted to Man beyond what is intelligible?'" His quixotic quest for a purely secular, humanistic "transcendence" continued.
No assessment of Malraux is complete without an account of the women in his life, and Todd provides an extended exposition in this respect. He details Malraux's two marriages: to Clara Goldschmidt (12 years), who bore him a daughter, Florence; and to Madeleine Lioux (20 years). He describes Malraux's long affair with Josette Clotis, who bore him two sons out of wedlock (they both were killed in a car accident, and Josette was killed when she fell beneath a train), and his romantic relationships with Louise de Vilmorin, and later with Louise's niece, Sophie. One of Malraux's acquaintances commented, "I think that M[alraux] has been very much loved by women, but I don't think he loved in return."
An inveterate opponent of Mussolini's fascism and Hitler's nazism, Malraux became a fellow traveler of Stalin's communism (he never was a member of the Communist Party) and admirer of Mao Tse-tung, with a glaring blind spot for atrocities committed by the leftist dictators. During World War II, Malraux fought in the resistance in France, although he was a Johnny-come-lately to the fray, joining the resistance not in 1940 as he claimed, but in the spring of 1944, shortly before the Allied invasion of Normandy.
After the war, Malraux, finally opening his eyes to the futility of revolution, made a volte-face, gravitating toward the political right, and became an ardent admirer of and apologist for Gen. Charles de Gaulle, and Minister of Culture in de Gaulle's government.
Whatever one makes of him, Malraux had superb taste in literature, and no little talent as a novelist, although, as Todd points out, he is not to be trusted as a historian. Todd calls him "a compulsive liar" and again, "The lie, whether boastful, poetical, political, or risky, was a constant with Malraux." Denigrating "the fiction of objectivity, Malraux's hyperactive imagination transmuted reality into his own romanticized version of history, mythomaniacally and megalomaniacally making himself "the genius" and "the hero" of the plot, thereby putting into practice the claim of Nietzsche's aphorism, "There are no facts, only interpretation."
Malraux is neither hagiography nor hatchet job, although it leans toward the latter. Todd is relentless in his exposure of Malraux's inflated reporting of historical events in which he claimed to be intimately involved and of his numerous character and personality flaws. "Malraux's phrases, writes Todd, "were often like firecrackers. Lots of noise and sparks when lit, but afterwards only smoke."
Todd is eminently fair, however, in his assessment of Malraux's creative talent, calling him, along with Camus and Sartre, one of the greatest French writers of the 20th century. "For me," writes Todd, his [Malraux's] two greatest novels will always be the hybrid, powerful L'Espoir [Man's Hope] and his own staggering, rollicking life."
Roy E. Perry of Nolensville is an advertising copywriter for a Nashville publishing house. (...)
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
The Hero
By Howard J. Herskovitz
This is the story of a bogus hero. Malraux was a great character who presented himself to the world as a great hero. Some of his exploits were misrepresented by him. Some of them never happened. A few were almost as he described them.
It must be noted that he did have an interesting life. He was a real adventurer who took real risks. Nevertheless, his life was not much like the life he claimed or implied. He always seemed to be a con-man or fabulist. He was not a nice person either.
His reputation is based his writing which was actually quite good. A number of his books are still read with enjoyment. Afew are still highly regarded. Now that it has long been established that he was not really the model for his fictional protagonists, it is possible to enjoy his books for what they are.
The author views Malraux's life with a jaundiced eye, perhaps too jaundiced. Nevertheless, this is a well-done view of an author who appeared, in his day, to have rock star qualities. in addition, Malraux's novels have survived his nonsense in reasonably good shape.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The kind of biography that tells you more than you ...
By Walter J Gordon
The kind of biography that tells you more than you want to know. However, I am partial to philosophical biographies. I just want to know what their contribution to thought was.
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