Word: camus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...probably apocryphal, but they say that the original version of The Postman Always Rings Twice inspired Camus to write The Stranger. It's pretty difficult to imagine old Albert sitting in a movie theater, watching a movie that oozes of sex and murder, and coming up with the notion of nobility in the face of the Abyss. It's easier to picture Mickey Spillane sitting there with a bunch of his corporate-thugs and coming up with the idea for a whole series of pulp thrillers. Maybe there's some meaning lurking in the fact that we were gushing over...
...time of dramatic contradiction in Paris, for despite the air raid warnings and the sudden imposition of the Nazi superstructure, some normal life continued to exist. It was, paradoxically, a time of artistic flowering in France--many theaters flourished, and Les Enfants du Paradis was being filmed. Camus and the like were writing for the newspapers and carrying on the Resistance. There was an intellectual and social defiance which the Nazis could never conquer, and it continued despite the imposition of censorship and curfew--even though if one missed the last metro, the veneer of normal life would vanish...
This same minimalism characterizes the prose. Gifford has cleared away the fatuousness and swagger that disfigures the writing of most young writers, leaving a terse prose that is controlled and accurate and clean to a degree that rivals Hemingway and Camus. Gifford describes the world cooly, and precisely, yet always loads the prose with feeling. His lyrical economy haunts us like the voices of our dreams; somehow it all stands out. There is something undeniable about sentences like this...
...other hand, his allusions and allegories flow unceasingly, as anyone familiar with Getting Even, Without Feathers, or any of the movies can attest. For instance, Allen on Camus: "The night was windy and dark, and Cloquet had a split second to decide if he would risk his life to save a stranger. Unwilling to make such a momentous decision on an empty stomach, he went to a restaurant and dined." And a few sentences later, on Sartre: "A feeling of nausea swept over him as he contemplated the implications of his action. This was an existential nausea, caused...
...find it hard to cruel with a smile, don't you?" sings Jagger, and you remember that they wanted him to star in A Clockwork Orange. That's what's genuinely scary about The World According to Jagger: when chaos rules, the hero has no choice but, like Camus's Caligula, to join it, and outdo...