Man's Fate

Man’s Fate (1932)

André Malraux

Man’s Fate is the sort of book that, on paper, I should adore whole-heartedly, with every bit of my soul, but, unfortunately, that paper is not the paper this book was actually printed on. That’s some imaginary paper, some head paper. It presses all my buttons: socialist violence in a foreign country, urban guerilla warfare, state repression, proletariat control of industry, the strange aromas of somewhere I’ll never go highlighted by the tang of gunpowder, executions in the dust, and so on. I should have loved this book but something about it was so lacking. A definite case of “so close yet so far.” I’ll try to discover why I was so disappointed in this novel, and hopefully I can articulate that.

I came into it with really high expectations: I was anticipating basically The Battle of Algiers in book form but instead got a really boring political novel which isn’t what I wanted at all. The former would be amazing. The latter already clog our bookshelves. The Earth is deforested for boring political novels. Malraux managed to take a really fascinating and electric event (in this case the Shanghai Massacre, a particularly violent and nauseating episode in the Chinese Civil War) and totally suck the life out of it through an excess of adornments and a general bloat. A book like this needs to be lean, hard, and taut. It needs to run towards the entrenchments of the State with its head down and its finger on the detonator. Instead Malraux piles on extraneous characters and scenes that do little except confuse and muddle. Right after the table of contents there is a list of the principal characters. There are seventeen names, and you could easily cut out fourteen of those and the book wouldn’t be any worse for it. Ferral, the French business magnate and sexual glutton and the dissolute and affected social changeling and grifter Baron de Clappique both stand out as being completely frivolous. Only Ch’en the terrorist, Kyo the organizer, and Katov the Russian have any sense of purpose in terms of the story, and even then they are weak and undeveloped characters. I have no stake in them or their struggle, a struggle Malraux doesn’t make very clear. He either gives too much or too little information. I’m not sure which. These are characters who do things but aren’t things, if that makes any sense. Man’s Fate reads like someone explaining the plot to a violent video game, one with lots of gun violence and grenade tossing, that is punctuated by really long scenes of boring, pointless dialogue during which anyone who’s played a video game before would set the controller down and go to pee. Call of Duty: The Chinese Revolution. I hate to bring up Roberto Bolaño for the umpteenth time, but he’s my favorite writer so I compare everyone to him, but one thing I admire and adore about a Bob Bolaño story is that they are populated by people and not by characters. I think it’s a good rule to follow.

This was one of the most frustratingly uneven and amateurish novels I’ve ever read. Neither of these are death sentences for a novel, and there are plenty of great things out there that are “amateurish” that I love but Man’s Fate is not one of them. Malraux’s problem as a writer is that he doesn’t know where to focus his attention. He wastes time. He wastes words. He’ll try to shoot a target and hit one he wasn’t aiming at. He’ll move around some little stick figure of a character for several dozen pages and then knock you dead with a couple paragraphs explaining the inner turmoil of a character that is so unimportant he may as well not be there.  Maybe that’s the point (most people on this planet are so unimportant that they may as well not be there) and I’m just not getting it, but if it was it didn’t do thing one for me. I wanted this book to be so much better than it was, I wanted to love it and it just kept on letting me down. Malraux’s heart is definitely with the Communists but every word he devotes to the banal activities of some French womanizer is a word that could be better spent in the basement fixing Molotov cocktails. The imperialist fascist plutocrats of this world don’t need to be humanized, they’ve already got everything on their side. I guess what really irked me about this book is that fifty percent of it is a misapplication of energy.

Not everything about this book is bad. Malraux can do some writing, some of it stands out (but it is tragically infrequent). He can definitely turn it on but I don’t think he knew when he should. One of the things that I noticed, that must have been a part of Malraux’s plan is that the characters, the revolutionaries, really only seem to come alive when death is at hand. They wake up during conflict and violence. I think Malraux was trying to make a point about revolution, about how it asks men to sacrifice themselves for a cause, and that this sacrifice may be the most important and noteworthy thing they’ve ever done in their lives (which are miserable, tragic and short) and it’s at this point of sacrifice that they truly become men, but, unfortunately, there’s two hundred pages of boring political dialogue preceding. If it were focused on just that one point Man’s Fate would have been the flick of a switchblade behind me in an alleyway. Instead large sections of this book weren’t much more immediate than C-SPAN. Maybe I’m misreading it, or I didn’t understand Malraux’s intentions, but like I said, a good chunk of this book comes off as completely extraneous. And, since I want to spend some time on the bright side I’ll add that the book isn’t racist, which is a lot more than I expected from a novel about foreign conflict written by a Frenchman in 1932. Shit, it sometimes seems like a lot to ask from books printed today. It wasn’t even misogynistic! That was a pleasant surprise.

I’ve never had this exact feeling before but when I finished this book I immediately wished for a time machine so I could go back in time and tell Malraux how to shape this book into being what it wants to be. The skeleton is there, but the flesh is horribly mismatched. Listen, chief, I’ll say to an astonished Malraux, as I materialize in his study. I’m from 2012 and I know about books. Lemme tell you what the score is… I’ll dazzle him with future slang (chief, dude, broseph) and show him my telephone. A guy like me spends a lot of time daydreaming about time machines (at least forty-five minutes a day) but usually one daydreams about travelling to 1984 and battling cyborgs or seducing future babes on a space station, get Mary Jane 147X on the space couch, unzip her space jumpsuit... this is the first time I’ve wanted a time machine to fix a book that disappointed me. It didn’t just bore me, and it wasn’t a bad book that I can shrug off and dismiss. You know what this book was, and it just came to me, but this book was such a fucking cocktease. You take her out for dinner, she points her tits at you all night long, and then when you take her home she leaves you standing in the cold on her porch without a friend in the world besides your aching stiff lizard. The literary equivalent of blue balls.

On a personal note: I’ve read a long string of books that either didn’t really do much for me or weren’t very good. The low point was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, which was the most godawfully pretentious and privileged book I’ve ever read in my life. It made Pride and Prejudice look like Grapes of Wrath. But it seems like this whole summer I haven’t read a book that I would call a life-changer. Nothing that will stick with me forever. The Story of the Eye was good, and The Time Machine was good, but they weren’t books that I worshipped and adored. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older now and the romance is gone but it seems like those are getting fewer and further between. Maybe I’m having some kind of mid-career slump? I don’t know, but I do know that I want to hear the warm and comforting voice of a friend. I need some Bobby Bolaño in my life is what I’m saying. Next up is one of his books of short stories, Last Evenings on Earth, and I’m very excited about it. I could say a billion words about Roberto Bolaño and I won’t stop until I do.