Why is it that every few weeks this guy produces one of the best things I've read on almost every subject he takes up? I don't know whether to be impressed or annoyed. In the April 9th New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has some unusually thoughtful and pithy things to say about Albert Camus. It's not available online unless you want to pay for it, but you can stroll right over to the library (remember those?) and read it. Here's an excerpt:
"What Camus wanted wasn't new: just liberty, equality, and fraternity. But he found a new way to say it. Tone was what mattered. He discovered a way of speaking on the page that was unlike either the violent rhetorical cliches of Communism or the ponderous abstractions of the Catholic right. He struck a tone not of Voltairean Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft. Camus sounds serious, but he also sounds sad -- he added the authority of sadness to the activity of political writing. He wrote with dignity, at a moment when restoring dignity to public language was necessary, and he slowed public language at a time when history was moving too fast."
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2 comments:
Gopnik is quickly becoming one of my favorite people to read. He, like Camus, gets it; tone is what matters.
...And occasionally his tone is just a little over-the-top flippant. But not often.
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