Word: thirsted
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What the novel shares with The Lost Weekend, a famed and far better book of 16 years ago, is the gift for making the nightmarish thirst and terror of an alcoholic demoniacally real...
Sadistic & Sick. Less clear and distinctly alien is the rationale for Nunne's sadistic murders, all of which occur discreetly offstage. Novelist Wilson's argument is that crime is a thirst for freedom, a chance to wrest a heroic identity from a world of regimented boredom and blurring mediocrity. In a sick society, the superman becomes a monster. A trip to the morgue finally opens Gerard's eyes to the monstrosity of Nunne, but not before the reader has suffered much quasi-Nietzschean chatter to the effect that "if a man could kill all his illusions...
...wrote Caligula in 1938, an ominous time of madmen and monsters, but even then Caligula was not in any usual sense tendentious. No self-made, power-mad Brown-shirted or Black-shirted or Red dictator, Caligula was bred to the purple; endowed with unlimited power, what he came to thirst after was unlimited "freedom." Camus' Caligula, whose once very human blood has turned to bile, and from bile to venom, would have the impossible: he would dispense with love, reason, friendship-every bond uniting humanity. He would as passionately destroy as other men create, would claim...