Word: koestler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Though it summons up the fictional nightmares of a Kafka or a Koestler, this episode is a matter of cold-sweat fact. It was the first session in an ordeal by torture undergone by French Communist Journalist Henri Alleg, 37, at an "interrogation" center at El Biar, in suburban Algiers, during June and July 1957. His torturers: paratroopers of the French army's 10th Division-later rebels against the Republic-to whom the use of torture has apparently come to be regarded as a "necessary" weapon against the Algerian nationalists...
...Germanic near mysticism. I'm Not Stiller is already a European bestseller and has been hailed as a masterpiece; perhaps it is more accurate to describe it as the first novel since World War II that has tried to exploit the rich, mixed inheritance handed down by Kafka, Koestler and Mann...
Twentieth Century: "Our truth was a half-truth, our fight a battle in the mist . . . and those who suffered and died in it were pawns in a complicated game between two totalitarian pretenders for world domination." So wrote ex-Communist Novelist Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler after he came home from Spain's civil war. As CBS's corrosive documentary, War in Spain, made grimly clear, the pretenders were Hitler and Mussolini on one side and Stalin on the other, and the game that divided a nation against itself was a grisly dress rehearsal for the greatest...
...sees Big Brother's ultimate depredations in the destruction of conscience ("The very nature of right and wrong has changed"). Considering Author Fast's onetime reputation, the book will take its minor place in the long shelf of disillusion, alongside the works of such better writers as Koestler, Silone, Orwell, Malraux. The fact remains that Big Brother's U.S. pen pal has a conscience that seems to work slower than most. In accounting terms, he might be described as LILO-last in, last...
...seem to read less for esthetic pleasure than for answers. They still study, though they do not imitate, such erstwhile heroes as Hemingway and Joyce, but the nearest thing they have to a U.S. literary ideal is Faulkner. James Gould Cozzens has made little impression on them. Students read Koestler, but Orwell gets a bigger play. Eliot holds his own, but as much for his criticism as for his poetry. Dylan Thomas is admired, but evokes no hysteria. Students still delve into Freud, but they are just as apt to be worried about the psychology of The Organization...