Word: lottman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since Albert Camus's death in a 1960 car crash, these images have totally obscured the writer. Journalist Herbert R. Lottman's voluminous work attempts to sweep away rumor and legend in the hope that a man will emerge. But Camus is much too elusive for mere biography. After 753 pages, the subject seems as melodramatic in death as he was in life...
Jean-Paul Sartre hailed it as a new classic, and he was soon joined by a choir of enthusiasts. As Lottman notes, "Fame traveled by train in those times." It took some months for the author's reputation to reach beyond the precincts of Paris. By then, the Nazi-occupied city had other matters to contend with. Camus joined the Free French, writing for the underground newspaper Combat...
...crippling writer's block, and complained of sterility and decay. Even the Nobel, awarded in 1957, was perceived as both an honor and an invasion of privacy. "I'm castrated!" he complained to a friend. The cry, like many of his statements, was pure theater. Yet as Lottman shows, Camus produced no more major work. He retreated to the sanctity of his home, to Francine and their twins, and was at work on a new novel, The First Man, when he was suddenly killed. He was eulogized every where; even Sartre wrote a lyric tribute...
...strenuous effort to help readers make their own last judgment about Camus, Lottman seems to have talked to everyone who ever shared an espresso or a bed with the author. But the book offers an utter catholicity of research and taste...
...violent conclusion, as at the start, Lottman's Camus is the projection of a cinematographer, made up of thou sands of irrelevant and vital images that constitute a film-but which are, after all, only flickering suggestions of the truth...