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Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine)

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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.

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.

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.

Malraux's look at the 1923 Chinese Revolution is a book which manages to provide a compelling picture of 5 or 6 people involved directly or peripherally with the Communist uprising in Shanghai. While the author's sympathies are clearly left-wing, don't let that keep you from reading it--ultimately he is more concerned with individuals than causes.

Malraux is sympathetic with all his characters, even the opportunists, and gets inside their different motivations with great depth. Occasionally, it feels as if he is groping for an impossible emotional precision in what is clearly a moral swamp. This induces some unwanted drag on the book.

However, this is more than made up for by scenes of immense and touching humanity, as when one revolutionary (Katov) delays his search for a comrade who is under threat of arrest long enough to console another whose family responsibilities have forced him to deny his impulse to aid his comrades. What makes the scene great isn't just humanity of their interchange, but Malraux's recognition and explication of Katov's impatience to find his threatened comrade WHILE he is consoling his friend.

Malraux's concern for the individuals also makes a mockery of the "institutional" nature of the Communist revolution. His characters realize the opportunities and dangers of the revolution far more than their leaders in Moscow. There various attitudes and emotions contradict the idea of the "ideological" proletariat who MUST follow a specific revolutionary path.

While this is a relatively easy read with a plot that will carry you along, be aware that the mood is grim and the ending certainly not upbeat. Still, it is a terrific look at humanity under difficult circumstances.

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.

As a young man in the late 1920's many held out high hopes that the French writer Andre Malraux would become an accomplished revolutionary writer, or at least an extraordinary writer of revolutionary sagas. No less a communist literary critic than Leon Trotsky, the consummate man of action and letters, praised his early work. Man's Fate is a prime example of the reason that leftist critics praised his work. Although later events would destroy his reputation as a writer and as a man of action on the left this novel takes its place in the pantheon of well written expressions of the dilemma of modern humankind confronted as it is with one half of itself mired in the mundane bourgeois (and in this case also feudal) world and the other half striving toward a more just and equitable society.

The action of the novel takes place in the throes of the Second Chinese Revolution at a point where the alliance between Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party had broken down and Chaing was ready to butcher the Communists in order to take undisputed control of the Chinese state. Like Russia before it, everyone had known that a second Chinese Revolution was coming. The only question at that point was whether it was to be a bourgeois revolution in the classic Western sense or a socialist revolution that would go a long way to helping the Soviet Union of the 1920's break out of its isolation after various unsuccessful revolutionary attempts in the West had failed. As it turned out neither event occurred at that time. This tension, and especially the tension of the Communists who were under orders from the Communist International, and hence Moscow, to subordinate themselves to Chiang unconditionally, is what drives the action.

The novel is also a snapshot of what the Communist International's `high policy' looked like as it was implemented on the ground among the secondary cadre and rank and filers of the Chinese Communist Party, their allies, semi-allies, adversaries and the merely indifferent. In addition, it is also an early literary expose of the relationship between those who carry out, even if in small ways, Western imperialist policy in their separate and exclusive colonial enclaves and those `natives' who do the `coolie' work. That tension exists today, as can readily be seen in places like Iraq, so one should pay particular attention to that dynamic. Read on.

Andre Malraux became France's Minister of Culture but before that he wrote this and everything about his prose style and characters are so very civilized. Thats what makes the events described here all the more shocking. From Old Man Gisors, the opium smoking oracle, to the young Chinese student revolutionaries to the French gambler to the assassin everything is told in so controlled a manner as to make these things seem impossible to happen. But they do. This is China on the eve of the Communist Revolution. The French have been busily at work doing business in the ancient land when suddenly the political climate changes. Each character is affected by these events in very personal ways. Malraux gets to the very core of each. His end to tell each persons story without prejudice to which side one is on. A very interesting technique. We understand all sides of the equation at once. Arresting, breathtaking fiction. Every character is real. Malraux did not rise to this level of performance again. Read this for the history and for the level eye which Malraux brings to it.

Author Andre Malraux was qualified to write about left wing revolutionaries because he was one himself. This book is set in 1927 China at a time when the communists and Chiang Kai Shek's nationalists were joined in an uneasy alliance. But the alliance is already cracking by the end of the book, the nationalists are demanding that the communists disarm themselves, and the communists are trying to assassinate Chiang. This is not a history book, though. The book is about its leading characters, not about the course of history.

Just to give you a taste of the people you will meet in the book, there is Kyo Gisors (half French, half Japanese) and his wife May (German). Being good left wingers, they believe in free love. But when May tries it, Kyo finds out that theory and practice are two different things. She suggests that he try it himself, but to him that's not the point. Reality has intruded in his life of theory, and he is not about to get over his feelings of jealousy and betrayal.

This is an interesting story about interesting people but it doesn't have the sustained intensity of a thriller.

Andre Malraux, is in most book stores found with the philosophers,"The Fate of Man" however shows that he is also a novelist and a scolar of the first order. I don't know how many of the people whom I know that have read this book who consider it one of the best they ever read. One needn't agree with him to appreciate his skill as a thinker and a story teller.

Ugh. This novel is just as clumsy as I remember from college.

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.

This novel let me down badly; it's no better than I remember it.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)

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.