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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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