Word: camus
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...long ago, discussion of death was largely a select European import -Camus, say, in The Myth of Sisyphus. Suddenly, death is an exceedingly popular topic in America. It is even an academic specialty: the University of Minnesota boasts a Center for Thanatological Studies, while U.C.L.A. has a Laboratory for the Study of Life-Threatening Behavior. On the lecture circuit, "the subject of death is now outdrawing the perennials-sex and politics," writes Roman Catholic Theologian Daniel C. Maguire in the current issue of the Atlantic. Maguire's essay describes a new genre he calls "the thanatology book...
...works. But the author does a fine turn on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and he perceives, in an epiphany whose correctness is apparent, that Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote not only The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, but also The Myth of Sisyphus, generally credited to Albert Camus, and Waiting for Godot, which has been claimed for Samuel Beckett. If you don't believe it, he argues, read all three works; the language is identical...
...plot that is little more than a simple, formal dance of death must be well served in the telling. McGuane brings powers of concentration to writing that recall Camus as much as Hemingway. Unlike Camus, McGuane is no thinker, but his Key West is as palpable as the Algiers of The Stranger. His prose shimmers like heat: "Thunderous light fills the city and everyone moves in stately flotation." Ninety-Two in the Shade is the best book yet of a very strong young writer. · Martha Duffy
...maze of the twentieth century? The myths are so rich in tragedy, epic lives, passionate ideals, saturnalian revelry, and comic twists of fate that they beg for modernization. Claiming such undertakings to be bastardizations, staid classicists might curse the lack of inspiration, the sterility of these transformations. "Myths," said Camus, "are made for the imagination to breathe life into them." John Gardner's epic poem, Jason amd Medeia shows that the modern imagination, violently panting while it makes love to mythology, is still very potent indeed...
...last works, now being published in English translation, with an eerie sense of death anticipating art. This is especially true of Runaway Horses, the second volume of the tetralogy; for its subject is right-wing rebellion and, presented in weirdly loving detail, the beauties of seppuku (ritual suicide). Camus said that "suicide is something planned in the silence of the heart, like a work of art." In Mishima, for all of the peculiar sensationalism of his death, there is a shocking aesthetic correspondence between the man's art and his final...