Word: camus
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...French Resistance, Malraux's works are linked with life." In the political arena, Malraux receives fewer encomiums, least of all from the young. University students today read Man's Fate, Malraux's prizewinning novel, almost as eagerly as they do Sartre's Nausea and Camus' The Stranger. "But he simply isn't actuel, timely today," says Marc Bianciardi, a young French literature teacher. "Malraux was the front-rank leader of our dreams," explains Pierre Rousset, a leader in the May 1968 uprisings in Paris. "But alas! He chose De Gaulle, chose to side with...
...midst of it all, Laurent's precocity impresses almost everyone: he writes fine essays on Camus and on suicide for his teacher at school, wins his mother's heart with his advanced sensitivity, and delights his brothers by adeptly following in their not-quite-rakish footsteps. He only manages to annoy his conservative father because of his lack of table-manners...
Laurent (Benoit Ferreux) is the youngest son of a prosperous Dijon gynecologist (Daniel Gelin) and his Italian wife (Lea Massari). Laurent's brothers are well-bred juvenile delinquents, but despite a pronounced affection for mischief, Laurent is different. Hardly into adolescence, he reads Camus and writes essays on existentialism that vex his schoolmaster-priest (Michel Lonsdale). Father Henri further advances his pupil's education by making tentative homosexual advances during confession, and Laurent's brothers chip in to buy him a bout with a tolerant whore. Laurent-perhaps because of all this frenetic activity-develops a heart...
...Merton points out, the "historically significant nonconformist," his own definition of martyr, often risks his life for a variety of motives, some noble, some not. There are cases, he notes, in which martyrdom may be little else than "an expression of primary narcissism" or "a need for punishment." Like Camus's Rebel, or Peter Viereck's "unadjusted man," the martyr is one who ultimately refuses to act according to the accepted norms of his society. He is psychological kin, in short, to both the gadfly and the criminal...
...from which he has been severed for ten years. His sole ambition is that classic one of all prisoners: to get through the day. A half-bumpkin who believes that stars are pieces of the moon, he survives on an untutored existential faith. What animates him is what moved Camus' Sisyphus: the prisoner fails because failure is immanent in man; he endures because he must. Courtenay's fellow prisoners are for the most part a collection of shaven heads conveying dislocation and anonymity...