Author: Andre Malraux
Publisher: Rupa
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8171676898
Description
This is the autobiography of arguably the most influential figure of the enlightened militant European conscience in the 1930s, Andre Malraux. He was a French novelist, art historian and statesman.
At the age of 21, while on an archaeological expedition in Cambodia, he was imprisoned for taking bas-reliefs from a Khmer temple. Mistreatment by the French colonial authorities turned him into a fervent anti-colonialist and an advocate of social change. He was one of France’s leading anti-Fascists.
Andre Malraux wrote several brilliant and powerful novels, including The Conquerors and The Royal Way. Malraux’s novels, like his life, are filled with adventures and political involvement, combined with a brooding pessimism about the destiny of Western man. Man’s Fate (known in U K as Man’s Estate) is considered his masterpiece.
After 1945 Malraux virtually abandoned novel writing for art history and criticism. His major work for this period was The Voices of Silence, in which he argues that art-and not any social or moral system-is humanity’s only permanent expression of the will to triumph over fate. Francois Mauriac, a contemporary, called Malraux, the greatest living French writer and certainly the oddest. He remains one of the most prominent European men of letters.
Contents
The Walnut-Trees of Altenburg
Antimemoiors
The Temptation of the West
The Royal Way
The Human Condition