61 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Another Great French Novel Mangled by a Bad Translation, July 3, 2003
This review is from: Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) (Paperback)
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.
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47 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The irony of fate, July 2, 2001
This review is from: Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) (Paperback)
André Malraux, who was a leftist in his youth, resisted the Nazis during WWII, and became minister of culture under DeGaulle, was a man that defied easy definitions. His novel "Man's Fate" resists easy classifications. This is a political thriller based on true events: a failed Communist uprising in China at the time of the uneasy alliance of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces and the Communists. For reasons of grand strategy, the decision-makers in Moscow opt for sacrificing their people to Chiang, betraying the very cadres who will die for the cause Moscow pushes. This is the main, but not the only, irony in the novel. There is an assassin who kills because that is the only moment when he truly feels alive (Ch'en). There is a man of mixed European and Japanese ancestry (Kyoshi) who fights for Communism because he believes it is the only answer to the desperate situation of the Chinese workers and peasants, the same Chinese workers and peasants that the rich Chinese have exploited with the help of Europeans, and that the Japanese will kill wholesale in the 1930's and WWII during their war against China. There is a professional communist agitator (Katov) who will behave like a hero when the time comes, but since now we know what the men and women of the Komintern did, it is clear that Katov was familiarized with torture and murder from the torturer and murderer's perspective.
The author's sympathies are with the Communists, but he is too honest not to write clearly that the "heroes" of this book could very well be seen as criminals and terrorists by the other side. "Man's Fate" is an engrossing novel. It reads fast and shows a very human aspect of a doomed revolution where betrayal is the name of the game and expediency the only applicable rule. Thus, the sacrifices that some of the main characters must endure, including torture and death, are reduced to simple convenience or inconvenience for their leaders, who will sacrifice them without a second thought.
A final irony that Malraux could not have foreseen when he published the novel in 1933, is that the defeated ones at the end of the book are the Communists, who will go on to win the big price itself, China, in 1949. The winners of the uprising in the novel are the Nationalists of the Kuomintang, who will end up losing China to the Communists and setting up their government-in-exile in Taiwan, under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership. And today, 70 years after "Man's Fate" was published, Taiwan is a new democracy, an industrial and technological powerhouse, while China is still led by a clique of Communists who answer to nobody and who will kill their own people in order to gain an advantage and stay in power, just like they did in the uprising that the novel describes, just like they did --by the millions-- during Mao's reign, and just like they continue to do to this day. If there is something such as man's fate, it is definitely ironic.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A treatment of humanity's permanence, March 5, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) (Paperback)
The story of Man's Fate is enough to make it a good book. However the implications of man's irrestible actions make it truly great. Malraux not only offers a view of the Chinese revolution but of all wars and the inevitable roles men play in them.
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