Cheap Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) (Book) (Andre Malraux) Price

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Customer Reviews of Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine)

Less a novel than an explication of adolescent, half-baked ideas
Ugh. This novel is just as clumsy as I remember from college. <
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>I like to occasionally re-read books that I read long ago in school. I often find that I was previously too immature to appreciate them, and I find much more that I understand from the perspective of an adult. <
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>This novel let me down badly; it's no better than I remember it. <
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>I have almost the exact same impression now that I had then. It has a gripping beginning -- Chen standing at the foot of the bed of his intended assassination victim, talking himself into striking through the mosquito netting. But after that exciting first scene, the remainder of the book is tedious. <
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>This novel is set in China, during revolutionary battles in the 1920s. What a missed opportunity to set irresistible scenes! How I would have loved to see these cities in my mind, to feel the commotion on their streets, to smell the smells and taste the tastes. But this novel provides almost none of that. These places and people remain lifeless, two-dimensional, little more than vessels for Malraux to impart his philosophies. <
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>The basic message of this book is that "man's fate" is to replay the same violent conflicts again and again, that they signfy nothing other than basic human drives. Ideology and politics are illusions, in Malraux's world. Although his sympathies are with the communists, he doesn't really provide clear reasons for this. Instead, he creates characters to represent different archetypes and to make his points; one has become a revolutionary to seek the dignity denied him by his mixed ethnic background; another is driven by the desire to die a meaningful death; another is cynically interested only in his own profit and then survival. Malraux suggests that these character types will always be with us, enacting the same tragic, violent dramas over and again. <
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>(For what it's worth, I believe Malraux to be wrong in this. One wonders if his world-weary cynicism is a function of his Frenchness, that is his having witnessed the hypocritical, self-serving nature of imperialism, and living with the historical fact that the French Revolution, in contrast with the American, truly was little more than an exchange of one set of authoritarians for another. But Malraux's core beliefs are wrong; the condition of humanity does in fact change; average man can and does conduct himself differently in a modern democracy than he did in Ivan IV's Russia; in our modern world, Malraux's fatalism is worse than merely wrong, it's dangerous.) <
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>If you like novels that serve as forums for fleshing out philosophical or political conceptions, you might enjoy this one. But if you read to experience the pleasure of an author's gift for narration, steer clear.

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Man's fate
I read the "Shanghai station" before and found this book mentioned in the appendix. This is a much better story. Tells very realistic the pre-revolutionary struggle in Shanghai, the conditions under which the local population lives. The state of Shanghai with it's international, foreign, colonial part. The desparation of the people. This book is very fascinating, however paints a somehow somber, depressing picture.

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Another Great French Novel Mangled by a Bad Translation
I am a native French speaker and a professor of French Literature. I love this novel and have a real bone to pick with this 1932 British translation, which refers to the hero-revolutionaries as "terrorists," a word which has come to mean something quite horrendous in America. Malraux's writing style is anything but stiff. It's the translator who chose stiff and stuffy words. Where there seems to be a tone of condescention from the translator, there is none whatsoever in the French. If anything, this is a very fluid novel, based on what Malraux considered an American style of novel writing. Fluid, fast-paced, character-driven. Why is this the only translation available to us in the US? Because the publisher probably didn't have to pay a copywright fee to publish this translation. It's a sin of greed -- how ironic when this novel is basically about that very thing.