What I Am Reading: "Man's Fate" by André Malraux
I was recently reading an article on modern literature that tossed out that "the works of such [1930s] contemporary world-spanning giants as Malraux and Gide slowly fade to oblivion." After reading this book, I can kind of see what they were getting at.
This was officially added to my reading list after enough Malraux references in other works, the same way many other writers are added. I thought that a nice revolution novel would be the right thing to turn me on to an author; but this work didn't grab me. It is about the 1927 Communist uprising in Shanghai, whereby after taking the city, the Communists were betrayed and massacred by their allies, the Kuomintaung under Chiang Kai-Shek. The story follows a small cell of Communists: Kyo Gisors, a half-French, half-Japanese man who wants to convince the other Communists to pre-emptively defend themselves against Chaing before he can side with the elite against them; Ch'en, who, having killed in the book's opening scene, attaches a mystical importance to murder and tries to kill Chaing'; and some others.
The book was full of pathos as these characters try, fail, and die; and they (and the others, including a misogynistic French businessman) all contemplate or discuss existential questions such as the impossibility to truly know what it is like to live as another person. The book didn't really grab me, and I think part of it was because all of this very Literary pondering slowed things down a lot and usually took a few re-reads to get a handle on. Some of the side characters brought a little more zest to the book, mainly Baron de Clappique, a French trader always stuttering out adventurous fables or having a complicated inner life; or Old Gisors, Kyo's father and a respected professor, an opium addict accepting but anguished about his son's dangerous revolutionary career. I looked forward to their passages, but overall I just couldn't wrangle the soul of this book. Maybe another try in the future.