Malraux: A Biography by Axel Madsen

Malraux (1976) is the biography of French novelist, art theorist, and French Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux (1901-1976), during the 1960s.

Paris-born, and extensively well-travelled, Malraux was called France’s ‘ambassador of the world.’ He was a man of action and a man of literature. He wrote of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat (when Cambodia was a French Protectorate), and of the Silk Route across Central Asia. He also searched Yemen and Saudi Arabia for the lost city of the Queen of Sheba.

At home in Paris, he championed a campaign to clean the blackened building facades.

Malraux had his share of tragedy. His father suicided; his brothers died in World War II, his second wife, Josette, died while slipping as she boarded a train in 1944 at the age of 34; and his two sons died in a car accident in 1961. Malraux is buried in Paris’s Panthéon.

This interesting, fascinating, and large biography, reads like a list of cultural characters with whom he has conversed, from Chairman Mao to Stalin, de Gaulle, Nehru, and John F. Kennedy, and from Hemingway to Trotsky, Chagall, Brecht, de Beauvoir, Satre, Picasso, and Camus. It’s well-written and thoroughly researched by the experienced biographer Madsen. Moreover, it places cultural affairs in its important historical context.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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