RAS BOOK CLUB
Monday, 17 June 2014 at 6:30 pm
Venue: RAS Library, Sino-British College
The RAS Book Club will meet to discuss:
Man’s Fate
by Andre Malraux
ISBN: 9788970552156
Publication Date: 1933
Copies of the book will be available at RAS events prior to this meeting. You may also obtain a copy of the book by contacting the RAS Book Club (see below).
Entrance: RMB 70.00 (RAS Members) and RMB 100.00 (non-members) including a drink (tea, coffee, soft drink, or glass of wine). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to this RAS Book Club event. Member applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
N.B. RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED AT THIS EVENT.
THE BOOK (Wikipedia)
Man's Fate, also translated as Man's Estate (French: La condition humaine, "The Human Condition"), is a 1933 novel written by André Malraux about the failed communist insurrection in Shanghai in 1927, and the existential quandaries facing a diverse group of people associated with the revolution. Along with Les Conquérants (1928), La Voie Royale (1930) it forms a trilogy on revolution in Asia.
The novel occurs during a 22 day period mostly in Shanghai, China; and concerns mainly the socialist insurrectionists and people involved. The four protagonists are Ch’en Ta Erh (whose name is spelled Tchen in the French version of the book), Kyoshi ("Kyo") Gisors, the Soviet emissary-Katow, and Baron De Clappique. Their individual plights are intertwined throughout the book.
Chen Ta Erh is sent to assassinate an authority, succeeds, and is later killed in a failed suicide bombing attempt on Chiang Kaishek. After the assassination, he becomes governed by fatality and desires simply to kill, thereby fulfill his duty as a terrorist, a duty which controls his life. This is largely the result of being so close to death since assassinating a man. He is so haunted by death and his powerlessness over inevitability that he wishes to die, just to end his torment.
Kyo Gisors is the commander of the revolt and believes that every person should choose his own meaning, not be governed by any external forces. He spends most of the story trying to keep power in the hands of the workers rather than the Kuomintang army and resolving a conflict between him and his wife, May. He is eventually captured and, in a final act of self-determination, chooses to take his own life with cyanide.
Katow had faced execution once before, during the Russian Civil War and was saved at the last moment, which gives him a feeling of psychological immunity. After witnessing Kyo's death, he watches with a kind of calm detachment as his fellow revolutionaries are taken out one by one, to be thrown alive into the chamber of a steam locomotive waiting outside, intending, when his turn comes, to use his own cyanide capsule. But hearing two young Chinese activists talk with trembling fear of being burned alive, he gives them the cyanide (there is only enough for two), himself being left to face the more fearsome death. He thus dies in an act of self-sacrifice and solidarity with weaker comrades.
Baron De Clappique is a French merchant, smuggler, and obsessive gambler. He helps Kyo get a shipment of guns and is later told that Kyo will be killed unless he leaves the city in 48 hours he will be killed. On the way to warn Kyo, he gets involved with gambling and cannot stop. He considers gambling "suicide without dying". Clappique is very good-humored and always cheerful all the time but suffers inwardly. He later escapes the city dressed as a sailor.
THE AUTHOR
Andre Malraux (November 3, 1901- November 23, 1976) was a French author, adventurer and statesman preeminent in the world of French politics and culture during his lifetime.
Malraux was born in Paris. His parents separated in 1905 and eventually divorced. He was raised by his mother, Berthe Lamy, and maternal grandmother, Adrienne Lamy. His father, a stockbroker committed suicide in 1930.
Malraux studied Oriental languages at the Ecole des Langues Orientales but did not graduate. At the age of 21 he left for Cambodia with his new wife, Clara Goldschmidt, Jewish heiress whom he married in 1921, and divorced in 1946. (They had a daughter, Florence, born in 1933, who married filmmaker Alain Resnais.) In Cambodia he was arrested and almost imprisoned for trying to smuggle out a bas-relief from the Banteay Srei temple.
He became highly critical of the French authorities in Indochina and in 1925 helped organize the Youth Annan League; he also founded the newspaper Indochina in Chains.
On his return to France, he published his first novel, The Temptation of the West (1926). This was followed by The Conquerors (1928), The Royal Way (1930) and Man’s Fate (1933). For the latter, a powerful novel about the defeat of a communist regime in Shanghai and the choices facing the losers, he won the Prix Goncourt of literature.
Included in his non-published work is Mayrena, a novel about the eccentric French adventurer, Marie Charles David de Mayrena, conqueror of the highlands of VietNam and first king of the Sedangs.
In the 1930s, Malraux joined the archeological expeditions to Iran and Afghanistan. He founded the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture with Louis Aragon.
During the Spanish War, Malraux served as a pilot for the Republican forces. His squadron gained something of the status of a legend after nearly annihilating part of the Nationalist army of Medellin. He was twice wounded during efforts to stop the Falangist takeover of Madrid. He toured the United State, in an attempt to raise funds for the Republicans. A novel about his Spanish war experiences, Man’s Hope, appeared in 1938.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Malraux joined the French Army and served in a tank unit. He was captured in 1940 during the Western Offensive but escaped and joined the French Resistance. He was again captured by the Gestapo in 1944 and although he underwent a mock execution, was rescued by members of the resistance. He ended up leading the Brigade Alsace-Lorraine in defense of Strasbourg and in the takeover of Stuttgart. He awarded the Medaille de la Resistance, the Croix de Guerre, and the British Distinguished Service Order.
During the war, he worked on a long novel, The Struggle Against the Angel, the manuscript of which was destroyed by the Gestapo upon his capture in 1944. A surviving opening book to The Struggle Against the Angel, named Walnut Trees of Altenburg, was published after the war. It would be his final novel.
He had two sons by Josette Clotis: Pierre Gauthier (1940-1961) and VIncent (1943-1961). Josette was killed in an accident in 1944 while Malraux was fighting in Alsace, having slipped while boarding a train. Both their sons would die in a single accident 17 years later.
After the war, General Charles de Gaulle appointed Malraux as his minister of information (1945-1946). In the 1950s he wrote about art and aesthetics, creating the concept of pan-cultural “Museum without Walls” in such books as Voices of Silence. He again became Minister of Information in 1958, and France’s first Minister of Culture from 1960-1969. During his term, he created the famous maisons de la culture throughout France and worked to preserve national monuments.
In 1948, Malraux married Marie-Madeleine Lioux, a concert pianist and the widow of his half-brother, Roland Malraux. They separated in 1966.
An international Malraux Society was founded in the United States in 1968. Former First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy was one of his greatest admirers and held a dinner in his honor at the White House in 1961. The two became friends and would talk to each other only in French.
In the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote books about Picasso, whom he knew well as an autobiography (Antimemoires). Malraus’ last political engagement was in support of Bangladesh in it’s 1971 secession from Pakistan.
According to his biography, Olivier Todd (‘Malraux: A Life’), Andre Malraux had Tourette syndrome. In 1974, he wrote a moving memoir of his own fatal illnesses, Lazarus.
He died in Paris on November 23, 1976.