[André Malraux] is often called a "tragic humanist," because in novels like Man's Fate, in particular, he was obsessed with the inherent tragedy of the human predicament. His characters were trapped by our common inability to transcend our human limitations, beginning with our mortality. But in later years his emphasis has changed somewhat: our metaphysical situation, as he sees it, remains tragic in essence, but his way of feeling it is less dramatic and he no longer writes tragic novels. He prefers to think of himself as a kind of "witness." (pp. 3-4)

The meaning of "witness" appropriate here emerges from a consideration of the Anti-memoirs. Nothing else explains the juxtaposition of brilliant passages from The Walnut Trees with accounts of interviews with Nehru, Mao, and de Gaulle, with a report of Malraux's own somewhat harebrained search for the lost capital of the Queen of Sheba…. (p. 4)

[In...