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- Man's Fate
-
-
- (June 25, 1934)
-
- Connoisseurs of Gallic wit will find little to please their
- palates in Man's Fate by Andre Malraux. The one comic episode,
- in which the conquering Ferral is made a fool of by his mistress
- but counters in kind, has too bitter a taste for fun. The scenes
- that will stick in a reader's memory are more sinister -- the
- phonograph shop after it had been bombed, with the bloody
- remains of the owner's wife and child; Ch'en's attempted murder;
- the crowded lines of wounded Communists lying in the station,
- waiting to be taken out and shot. Man's Fate is not a pleasant
- book but few readers will soon forget their encounter with it.
-
- The Author, at 32, already acknowledged as a front-rank
- European writer, Son of a French civil servant, he went to
- Indo-China at 20, made an archaeological expedition to Cambodia
- and Siam, was not only an eyewitness of some of China's
- bloodiest revolutionary years (1925-27) but an actor in them.
- He was Commissioner of Propaganda for the revolutionary
- government of the South; as a member of the Committee of Twelve
- he helped direct the Canton insurrection, saw plenty of
- hand-to-hand fighting. His story of the Shanghai rising is a
- compressed and fictionalized account of what actually happened.
- At present Author Malraux lives in Paris, working for the
- publishing house of Gallimard.
-
-