synopsis:

it's not easy to summarise this complex and highly intellectual work. this book depicts a Communist uprising in Shanghai and the party's later annihilation in a massacre led by its former ally Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist forces. Malraux's alienated revolutionary heroes - Chen, a young Chinse fighter, Kyo Gisors, an Eurasian organizer, Katow, a former student of medicine from Russia, and others - find a sense of human solidarity and dignity in action and death. Malraux examines the compelling forces that lead individuals to join a greater cause. Forced into a life of contempt, Chen, for example, portrays the man of action in the early phases of the Chinese Revolution. He dedicates himself to the communist cause. It is something greater than himself, a phenomenal concept that he has fused into. It is something for which he will give his life. How did this devotion come about? A combination of his personality, his interior life, as well as society's influence, molded him into a terrorist. Chen is self-destructive; he is controlled by his religion of terrorism and his fascination with death. He is representative of the dedicated soldier who begins as a "sacrificial priest" and ends as a martyr. After all, the ideologies of communism and terrorism were practically a religion to those involved in the revolution.

In the end of the novel, Katow gives away his cyanide capsules, and faces his death, complete aware of its nature - he will be thrown into the boiler of a steam locomotive:"Katow's corpse had not been retrieved. May had brought Kyo's body home with her as carefully as he were desperately badly wounded. There he lay, stretched out. Not serene, as he had imagined he would be before he killed himself but distorted by asphyxia, already something other than a man."about this book:The title of the book came from the 17th century philosopher Pascal. it is seen as one of Malraux's most famous novels. It won the Goncourt Prize and established his international reputation.this book had a huge influence on the writings of albert camus.