Kingdoms Of Deceit

The Kingdom of Farfelu with Paper Moons

André Malraux

Translated by W.B. Keckler

Fugue State Press

99 pages, $14

Anglophone readers now have a better view of the inner landscapes of a very young André Malraux, thanks to Fugue State Press. A translation, by National Poetry Series winner W.B. Keckler, of two early works, The Kingdom of Farfelu and Paper Moons, has just been published. Those who thought they knew Malraux as the heroic adventurer, fierce moralist, and author of Man's Fate, should be prepared to have their minds blown.

Paper Moons, written when the author was only 20-years-old, is a novelette, in three parts with prologue, enhanced with drawings, or more aptly, doodlings by the author. With a dedication to Max Jacob, this is the work of Malraux the precocious surrealist, eager to break through into the world of dreams while preserving a strain of narrative integrity that is often neglected or artificially imposed by his colleagues in the movement. Far from the so-called automatic writing of André Breton, which tends to induce a state of fatigue markedly contrasted with the sort of delirium-spawning the author apparently intended, Malraux's novellas are a pleasure to finish and contribute much to an understanding of the development of avant-garde writing in the last century.

Departing from the provocative anti-Symbolist proclamation-"There are no symbols in this book"-the novella begins with the moon above changing colors, as it frequently does on nocturnal acid trips. Paper Moons actually has the colorful intensity of a hallucination, conjuring flashes of Lewis Carroll in its pursuit of a group of balloons and their strange morphings-into flowers and fruits-until one of the fruits bursts open to reveal a bevy of sins, which will be our protagonists for the remainder of the novella. The last section, "Victory," takes place in the town of Farfelu, and ends with the murder of the town's Queen, whose name is Death. Why did they kill Death? By the time the question has arrived, the sins have forgotten, and it all comes to an abrupt, yet apt halt.

The Kingdom of Farfelu, written seven years later, is a more difficult work, yet still readable. It details the ruthless siege of a city, and the subsequent destruction of the attacking army by a school of scorpions. It is essentially a war story. Thematically, it is typical Malraux, yet stylistically it's anything but, combining the hallucinatory surrealism of Paper Moons with the apocalyptic vision of Lautréamont. In the words of Keckler, think "Full Metal Jacket transposed historically to the more distant past, slightly to the west."

Detractors may claim that these are merely two works of juvenilia, yet both books, while brash and childlike, are deceptive in their complexities. They also furnish something of a foundation for Malraux's later preoccupation with death and his fiercely moral stance on war. This book will make an excellent companion to Oliver Todd's recently published biography, Malraux: A Life (Knopf).