Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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About the most conventional thing a Harvard undergraduate of literary tastes can do is to write a novel about a Harvard undergraduate. The case of Wells Lewis, Harvard '39, is complicated by the fact that his father Sinclair, Yale '07, also writes novels...
Thus Man's Hope is a new kind of book, at once a literal report of the Loyalist side of the Civil War and a novel tracing the fates of some 20 leading characters who fight in it. It combines vivid journalistic observation with extraordinary imaginative flights, consequently stands out, not only as a novel but as the best piece of reporting that has come out of the Spanish Civil War. And as such it illustrates Malraux's theory of fiction-that the real news of the modern world can be better told in novels than in newspapers...
...Book. Man's Hope shows as irremovably as a birthmark the strain under which it was written. A big, fast-paced, sprawling, 511-page novel, divided into 58 episodes, it begins in Madrid, where arms are being distributed to militiamen, shifts to Barcelona, where a dwarf-like, sturdy little anarchist named Puig is leading 300 anarchists against Fascist troops. From a sequence of desperate, suicidal, lunging events, smoky with action, grisly with bloodshed, the leading characters emerge...
Some characters are called by their real names. Puig was a Barcelona anarchist killed early in the Civil War; Captain Hernández was actually in command at Toledo. Others are thinly disguised: Abel Guidez is called Gardet in the novel; Ramón Sender, leading Spanish novelist, is the original of Manuel...
...revolutionists when they suffer defeat. The observation is true of Malraux himself. At odds with the Communists after 1927, embodying severe criticisms of Comintern policy and tactics in Man's Fate and championing Trotsky, he swung around after Hitler seized power in Germany, wrote an anti-fascist novel, Days of Wrath, has been roundly denounced by Trotsky as a Stalinist agent. Learning to fly in 1934, he flew with his instructor over the Arabian Desert, discovered a ruined city which he said was the ancient home of the Queen of Sheba, but about which experts were noncommittal. A natural...