Word: koestler
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...appeal to Playwright Eugene Ionesco. A major contributor to the theater of the absurd (he prefers the term "theater of derision"), Ionesco reviews the influence of surrealists and dadaists without missing the historical joke: "They all wanted to destroy culture . . . and now they're part of our heritage." Arthur Koestler, a leading intellectual and novelist of the '30s and '40s, sounds weary and detached. "I'm vice president of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society," says the author of Darkness at Noon. The following year, he and his wife Cynthia would carry out a joint suicide pact at their London residence...
DARKNESS AT NOON-Arthur Koestler-Macmillan...
...Author Arthur Koestler little is definitely known. But he has written the most exciting novel of the season. The book begins with the clang of a cell door closing in a GPU prison. It ends with a shot in the back of the head in a murky passageway of the prison cellar. It moves with the speed, directness, precision and some of the impact of a bullet. More plausibly than any other book yet written, fiction or nonfiction, it gives the answer to one of history's great riddles: Why do Russians confess...
...Japanese have been known in the past for being able to turn their civilization on a dime. After 215 years of deliberate feudal isolation during the Tokugawa period, Japan threw itself open in 1854. It was, wrote Arthur Koestler, like breaking the window of a pressurized cabin: the Japanese crashed out into the world devouring everything that had been done or thought in the rest of the planet during their long encapsulation (the late Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution). Rarely has there been an ingestion of foreign influence so smoothly accomplished. The Japanese did something of the same thing...
...Beirut to Ethiopia, it is a wonder that he is able to distinguish the names of towns from Prime Ministers. Less a wonder is that these people sometimes grow hard around the heart; when you've seen one mutilation, you've seen them all. Still, as Arthur Koestler wrote of the war in Spain: "Anyone who has lived through the hell of Madrid with his eyes, his heart, his stomach, and then pretends to be objective, is a liar...