Malraux: A Life

Malraux: A Life

$74.95 AUD $20.00 AUD

Availability: in stock at our Tullamarine warehouse

Condition: SECONDHAND

NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.

Author: Olivier Todd

Format: Hardback

Number of Pages: 560


Writer, publisher, war hero, French government minister, Andre Malraux was renowned as a Renaissance man of the twentieth century. Now, Olivier Todd - author of the acclaimed biography Albert Camus - gives us this life, in which fact competes dramatically with his subject are previously little-known mythomania. We see the adventurous young Malraux move from 1920s literary Paris to colonial Cambodia, Cochin China, and Spain in its civil war. Todd charts the thrilling exploits that would inspire such novels as Man's Fate, but, just as fascinating, he also traces Malraux's lifelong pattern of lies: claiming friendship with Mao, he was called to tutor Nixon, despite having met the Great Helmsman only once; a minor injury becomes in recollections a near-mortal battlefield wound; stories of heroism in the French Resistance omit to mention that Malraux joined up just a few weeks before the Allied landings. With meticulous research, Todd separates myth from reality to throw light on a brilliant con man who would become a national hero, but he also lets us see Malraux's genuine achievements as both writer and man of action. His real life and the one he embroidered come together in this superb biography to reveal how Malraux, the protean genius, became his own greatest character.
Format: Secondhand, Hardback


Description
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.

Author: Olivier Todd

Format: Hardback

Number of Pages: 560


Writer, publisher, war hero, French government minister, Andre Malraux was renowned as a Renaissance man of the twentieth century. Now, Olivier Todd - author of the acclaimed biography Albert Camus - gives us this life, in which fact competes dramatically with his subject are previously little-known mythomania. We see the adventurous young Malraux move from 1920s literary Paris to colonial Cambodia, Cochin China, and Spain in its civil war. Todd charts the thrilling exploits that would inspire such novels as Man's Fate, but, just as fascinating, he also traces Malraux's lifelong pattern of lies: claiming friendship with Mao, he was called to tutor Nixon, despite having met the Great Helmsman only once; a minor injury becomes in recollections a near-mortal battlefield wound; stories of heroism in the French Resistance omit to mention that Malraux joined up just a few weeks before the Allied landings. With meticulous research, Todd separates myth from reality to throw light on a brilliant con man who would become a national hero, but he also lets us see Malraux's genuine achievements as both writer and man of action. His real life and the one he embroidered come together in this superb biography to reveal how Malraux, the protean genius, became his own greatest character.