Queen Sebeth in Senegal. To conclude this part of the book, which is a thematic confrontation of life (meaningfulness) and death (the absurd), Malraux relates his first experience of a return to life from a point of near death, an experience he calls “coming back to earth.” This one had occurred after his 1934 air search for the lost city of Sheba (which he claims to have located in Yemen); on his return flight to France, his airplane became caught in a seemingly fatal storm yet miraculously survived.

The second part of the book, “Anti-Memoirs,” finds Malraux meditating upon his encounters with two prominent statesmen, de Gaulle and Nehru. Each of these leaders played a primary role in saving the identity of his nation from meaninglessness and oblivion—in de Gaulle’s case from the Nazi occupation and the Algerian upheaval, in Nehru’s case from British imperialism. Malraux describes his own fears that after World War II the growth of Stalinist Communism would destroy the national identity of France, and he reveals how an unknown friend hoodwinked him and de Gaulle into meeting each other, an encounter that eventually led to Malraux’s appointment on de Gaulle’s staff. Faced by anti-imperialist upheavals in its colonies, France could protect its identity only by divesting itself of an anachronistic empire and forming a French community. De Gaulle sent Malraux as his emissary to various French colonies to explain this position, and Malraux recounts several stirring moments experienced in the Lesser Antilles.

A mental association between the dismantlings of the French and the British empires is natural, and Malraux proceeds to recount his visits with Nehru, who played a leading role in freeing India from British rule. As Malraux and Nehru discuss the problems of superpower hegemony, caste, and social justice versus nationalism, they recollect that imprisonment was an important common experience for them. Malraux then recounts his capture by and eventual escape from the Gestapo during World War II.

The next part, “The Temptation of the West,” like Malraux’s novel of the same title, is an East-West dialogue that deepens into considerations of philosophies and whole cultures as Malraux travels through India and Sri Lanka (Ceylon). Malraux meditates on the Hindu fatalism of Karma, its dualism in Shiva (god of destruction and creation), and its death-eluding supreme maya, which he associates with the symbolic Altenburg walnut trees. Half humourously, he tells how he, his nation’s minister of culture, was naively mistaken for an avatar of Vishnu, the preserver deity. Here also he includes another episode from his novel The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, in which the protagonist and his tank crew are caught in a German tank trap during World War II, give themselves up for dead, and then feel that sense of “return to the earth” and an affirmation of fundamental life when they manage to escape. This tale of near death and return to life leads into the account of a philosophical discussion between Malraux and Nehru, which concludes that the profoundest difference between European and Asian culture is, on the one hand, Europe’s view of death as real (stemming from its belief in the value of the individual life) and, on the other hand, the Hindu-Buddhist sense of the endlessness of life (in reincarnation and in interconnectedness). Characteristically, however, Malraux finds a commonality between Asia and Europe in their artworks (different though they are), for a work of art transcends its culture just as it survives the death of its culture and the aesthetics that produced it; it undergoes metamorphoses of appreciation rather than passing into incomprehension or oblivion.

The next part is titled “The Royal Way,” for Malraux’s novel about Indochina. This section explores the realm of romantic adventure and fantasizing—what Malraux calls the farfelu. Thus, when his ship undergoes repairs in Singapore, Malraux meets the mythomaniac Baron Clappique, a character from his novel Man’s Fate. Clappique reads him a film scenario about the legendary nineteenth century Frenchman David de Mayrena, a mythomaniac adventurer whose imperialist exploits in subduing the Moi tribes of Indochina were reflected in Malraux’s The Royal Way. The scenario is incorporated at length into Malraux’s text.

The final and climactic part of Anti-Memoirs is titled “La Condition humaine,” for Malraux’s most famous novel (known in America as Man’s Fate and in Great Britain as Man’s Estate). In this part, he describes his visit to China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and his meetings with the leaders of the most populous nation on earth, first with Foreign Affairs Minister Marshal Chen-yi, then with Premier Chou En-lai (on whose character the protagonist of Man’s Fate is supposedly based), and, finally, with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. All three men played heroic roles in the epic Long March, when the Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek unleashed his “extermination campaigns” against Mao’s Communists, campaigns that eventuated, ironically, in the victory of the Communists in 1949. Although the Communists suffered enormous losses and privations, they conferred dignity and humanity upon the Chinese underclass (the poor, the peasantry, and the women), while creating a new identity for themselves and their country. Analogies between the struggle of the Chinese Communists during the 1930’s and 1940’s and that of the Vietnamese Communists during the 1950’s and 1960’s are much in the minds of Malraux and his interlocutors. These thoughts about Asian guerrilla fighters give rise in Malraux to memories of his eulogy for Jean Moulin, the French underground leader during World War II who had fought to retain the identity of his nation and who had affirmed the dignity of the human spirit by refusing to talk during his fatal torture by the Nazis. These thoughts, in turn, lead Malraux to observations about a contemporary turn in the use of torture (for example, the Nazi concentration camps), whose purpose is no longer to extract secrets but to degrade the dignity and destroy the humanity of the victim.

Malraux ends his book, however, on an image of hope. He tells of his ministerial inspection tour of the caves of Lascaux, the site of rock paintings made by prehistoric Europeans. During World War II, Malraux had used the caves as a secret ammunition base (imagistically similar to Mao’s use of the Yen-an caves as his headquarters). In the 1960’s, these caves are within the purview of his ministry of culture. Significantly for Malraux, the preservation of these ancient artistic monuments of man’s humanity was assigned to French conscientious objectors as their alternative to military service.

So concludes Anti-Memoirs, which, in the English translation by Terrence Kilmartin, comes to 420 pages, including a dedication to Mrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy and a useful index, neither of which is in the French original. Actually, Anti-Memoirs is but the first volume of Malraux’s long autobiographical work Le Miroir des limbes (1967-1976; the mirror of limbo). Fascicles of this larger work were published as separate volumes between 1968 and 1976, and some have been translated into English: Les Chenes qu’on abat (1971; Felled Oaks: Conversation with de Gaulle, 1972), La Tete d’obsidienne (1974; Picasso’s Mask, 1976), and Lazare (1974; Lazarus, 1977).