Behind the many masks of eroticism and heroism—whether he seems momentarily to express Communist or Gaullist ideology, whether he chooses the novel or the essay as his means of expression—Malraux (perhaps like most great writers) has reiterated only one point under the most diverse forms: the absolute impossibility for any individual to communicate with any other, even with those who belong to the same group….

The book in which this message, the inexorability of human solitude, appears most clearly—and which is also the most successful of his novels—is without a doubt La Condition Humaine. (p. 117)

Malraux's fictionally individualized characters are nomads, like islands separated by uncrossable abysses; even when their will is not … driven to affirm itself against everything else and to emphasize its distinction, they never succeed in meeting except for brief moments and usually derisively….

In La Condition Humaine, the incommunicability between...