Word: koestlers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Arthur Koestler has composed a morality play for our times. It is not a great drama, for no sense of tragedy can permeate the cardboard world of animated abstractions that the book contains. But as a moral tale for the despairing civilization of the West, it conveys well the plight of a people lost without faith...
...Koestler has discerned a striking parallel between the rise of the Christian Church on the crumbling base of pagan Rome and the advance of contemporary Communism against a civilization which has lost faith in its God and is slowly disintegrating into the resultant void. He is not comparing the moral worth of Christianity with that of Communism; rather he demonstrates regretfully that strong faith of any kind can give impetus to social movements...
Fedya Nikitin personifies this new twentieth-century faith that is encroaching upon the bankrupt culture of the West. As cultural attache of the Paris office of the "Free Commonwealth" (a new name given the U.S.S.R. in the 1950's), Fedya has unquestioning faith in the ideals of the Party. Koestler maims the impact that such a character might have, however, for Fedya appears as more of an anthropomorphized concept than a real man with a fixed idea...
...write novels in the international manner, as Andre Malraux and Arthur Koestler do, a novelist needs to have been around. Geographically, at least, George Tabori has the qualifications. He was born in Hungary, became a British subject after many travels, now lives in France. His best book was a political novel about Italy (Companions of the Left Hand) ; another was a psycho-thriller, set in Egypt (Original Sin), which was chiefly notable for the longest dust storm in modern 1't-erature. This time, Tabori has written a perspiring little novel about Arabia, and garnished it with murder, intrigue...
...play is concerned with the gradual disillusionment and final disintegration of an imprisoned communist's once-powerful belief in the party. It is adapted from the novel by Arthur Koestler...