Malraux: A Life
*Starred Review* Hemingway, French writer Andre Malraux once complained, suffers from "delusions of simplicity." In this probing new biography--felicitously translated from the 2001 French original--Todd assures his readers that Malraux (who fought with Hemingway in the Spanish civil war) never approaches simplicity, not even in delusions. Rather, Todd confronts layer upon layer of complexity as he traces the tangled linkages between the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, in the puzzling life of Malraux. Todd's exhaustive research allows him to penetrate Malraux's elaborate personal mythology of phantom exploits in two wars and fantasized influence over the leaders of two continents, discovering not simple dishonesty but rather sophisticated compensation for a fatherless childhood spent in unavailing struggles against Tourette's syndrome. Similarly, in the political obtuseness that mars even Malraux's most brilliant work, Todd discerns not the simple blindness of the ideologue but instead the double vision (at once vatic and myopic) of the artist, for whom reality counts as mere raw material for his imaginative gifts. And most fundamentally, behind Malraux's simple denial of any interest in his own life, Todd descries the never-ending project of embellishing and memorializing fresh adventures for a protean self--now a leftist fellow traveler and now a right-wing Gaullist; now a lover of this woman and now a lover of that one. His deep sympathy for his subject always tethered by unblinking objectivity, Todd delivers the entire enigmatic man.Bryce ChristensenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved