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DIALOGUE WITH DEATH-Arthur Koestler-Macmillan...
...Darkness At Noon (TIME, May 26, 1941) Arthur Koestler made, of a man in a Soviet prison cell, one of the great symbols of humanity in our time. In Dialogue With Death* Koestler himself is that symbol. During the Spanish Civil War Koestler went to Spain as correspondent for the London News Chronicle, was captured by Franco's forces. Later the British Government got him out of Spain. But for 102 days (February to May 1937), in prisons at Malaga and Seville, Koestler learned what it means to be sure from hour to hour (yet never sure enough), that...
...fall of France challenged other values. France was more than a country. It was source and symbol of the most gracious, rational and rarified in Western civilization. In this sense, when France fell, night fell. To this dark fact men tried to readjust themselves in books like Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth ($2.50); Hans Habe's A Thousand Shall Fall ($3); Thomas Kernan's able and objective France on Berlin Time...
...give all the answers when some of the basic questions were still to be asked. The chief value that remained to be appraised in the light of the changed world was the human value of man himself. What that value was in 1941 no book of 1941 told. Novelist Koestler came closest to doing it. His Darkness at Noon is laid in a Communist prison. In one scene an imprisoned Communist taps through his cell wall to ask why his neighbor, a Tsarist officer, has first refused, then sent him cigarets. The nameless, faceless, voiceless Tsarist, the type...
Year of the Clown. From all the appalling bulk of printed paper, only two books-Koestler's novel and Auden's poem -made a dead-center philosophical attack on the real problems of 1941. But sometimes the philosophies have not the last word. One writer who is less pretentiously touched with genius than any of them is Ludwig Bemelmans. His Ecuadorian travelogue, The Donkey Inside ($3), was the most delightful book of a far from delightful year. This month he published his even better-written Hotel Splendide ($2.50), a collection of waiters' eye-views of life...