Word: camus
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Paris-Presse told the news in one stark word so closely identified with Albert Camus in life: ABSURD. In Paris small crowds of his admirers gathered around newsstands, not quite knowing what they were waiting for. One by one the celebrated names of French literature poured out their stunned tributes. Author Camus, 46, France's (1957) Nobel prizewinner, had been killed in a speeding sports car. "A stupid death," cried one Academician bitterly, but somehow nothing could have seemed more in keeping with the vision Camus had had of his time...
...come out of sun-baked Algeria -a strange and extreme land, he wrote later, that "gives the man it nourishes both his splendor and his misery." The son of a Spanish mother and a French farm laborer who was killed in the first battle of the Marne, Camus worked at everything from selling auto accessories to clerking at a prefecture de police to get his education. By the time he wrote his thesis at the University of Algiers, he had already had tuberculosis, had married and separated, joined the Communist Party and then quit in disgust. Before his death last...
...Despair. It was in 1942, when all humanity "stood at the open door of Hell," that France first heard of him, in his bleak first novel, The Stranger, set in a death cell, and then in a collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus explained his doctrine of the absurd. Its first words are: "There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide," and its conclusion is that in a world with no God, man's only hope is to keep the absurd alive, and thus suicide is unthinkable. Because Camus articulated despair...
Black Orpheus (French). Winner of the 1959 Grand Prix at Cannes, this wildly beautiful adaptation of the old legend is made new and vital by an unknown cast, the brilliant direction of Marcel Camus, and a Brazilian tropical background...
...critic wrote: "Camus has forced man to the mirror. Good or so long as he writes, there will be no rest." Rest is precisely the thing which can make irrevocable man's slavery. And we can justly fear that without the relentless voice of Camus, the temptation to abandon the struggle is a little nearer to being overpowering...