In these posthumously published notebooks of Camus, written well before he was thirty, one can find the seeds for almost all the later works, from The Stranger and Caligula on to The Fall. The themes, however, present themselves more peripherally than profoundly, and what we have here, often in those clear, classic constructions which so marked the Nobel Prize winner's style, is really genius in its green days: something explorative, something essayistically exuberant, at times very moving. Camus same early to the truth as he saw it: modern man's confrontation between ideals and deologues, the hero as exile in a blank slate of existence, a universe without God, a day-to-day monotony of megalopolis, of alienation both from humanity and from nature. For Camus the experience of the absurd was everywhere— "not only is there no solution, but there aren't even any problems"; yet as the notebooks and the novels show he sought both. Over and over in these pages, filled with a young man's debt to persons (readings n Kierkegaard, Aurelius, Tolstoy), to place (travels in Algeria, France, Italy) and to casual contacts (scraps of overheard conversation; studies in character), it is the "complete awareness" of the facts, of death and of freedom, of love and despair, which he preaches. Sensual fulfillment and stoical objectivity are the weapons, the acceptance of pleasure and of pain the programme. A resolution to live within the limits of the possible, a tragic joy in a "univers absurd", these cahiers are relevant and revelatory, the journey of an era and a man.
Pub Date: July 15, 1963
ISBN: 1569249938
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1963
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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