Dashingly brilliant, irreverent and very intimidating treatment for our French intellectuals.
Infinitely qualified and smartly entertaining biographer Todd (Albert Camus, 1997, etc.) sifts through the mythic life of the French novelist, Nobelist-manqué and supreme political chameleon.
Throughout this marvelously enjoyable life-as-a-novel, Todd continuously circles the question: Who was André Malraux (1901–76), really? High priest, trafficker in stolen goods, genius, dope addict? From early on, as the son of a suave banker-engineer and a baker’s daughter in the Parisian suburb of Bondy, Malraux “wielded a weapon: a dark beauty and magnetism that could make an impression of familiarity or shamanic intensity.” Tourette’s syndrome burdened him with uncontrollable tics but didn’t impede his relentless, autodidactic ambitions as he morphed from Parisian rare-books broker, publisher, and early protégé of Max Jacob’s to intellectual and literary gadfly. His marriage to the German-Jewish heiress Clara Goldschmidt, who lent intellectual direction and emotional grief to his entire life, prompted restless travel to Asia—travel that would provide fodder for Malraux’s fiction. His epistolary essay Tentation de l’Occident garnered attention and a job with publisher Gallimard; his debut novel, Les Conquérants, proved the “first good roman engagé of the decade,” opines Todd cockily; the third part of his fictional Asian trilogy, La condition humaine, won the Prix Goncourt in 1933. At first a lukewarm communist and supporter of Trotsky, Malraux later led the French vanguard to the Soviet Union and staunchly praised the system. His personal involvement in the Spanish Civil War, organizing a squadron and gathering munitions for the Republicans, resulted in L’Espoir, considered by Todd (and many others) his best novel. By WWII he had battled with the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade and been duly decorated. Yet it was through his work as propagandist for Charles de Gaulle that Malraux assumed his power as crusader for High Art—“the supreme weapon against Death,” he declared. 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.
Dashingly brilliant, irreverent and very intimidating treatment for our French intellectuals.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40702-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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