Word: koestler
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Dates: during 1941-1941
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Darkness at Noon ($2), Arthur Koestler's coldly incandescent novel about the ultimate moral dilemma of Russian purgers and purged...
...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...
...Koestler found himself behind the barbed wire with Croat peasant partisans, Spanish syndicalists, Czech liberals, Italian socialists, Hungarian and Polish Communists, German undergrounders, Russians of various political shades whose only common denominator was that they hated Stalin and denounced one another to the French Surete Nationale. All these were "the scum of the earth." Nearly all "bore the physical or mental marks of torture and persecution in the countries from which they had escaped, and for a more enlightened [French] administration these marks should have been regarded as the stamp of their bona fides and loyalty." But they were indesirables...