ALBERT CAMUS: ELEMENTS OF A LIFE
Book ID/图书代码： 03360009B34041
English Summary/英文概要： Like many others of my generation, I first read Camus in high school. I carried him in my backpack while traveling across Europe, I carried him into (and out of) relationships, and I carried him into (and out of) difficult periods of my life. More recently, I have carried him into university classes that I have taught, coming out of them with a renewed appreciation of his art. To be sure, my idea of Camus thirty years ago scarcely resembles my idea of him today. While my admiration and attachment to his writings remain as great as they were long ago, the reasons are more complicated and critical.?-Robert Zaretsky
On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus was dining in a small restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank when a waiter approached him with news: the radio had just announced that Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus insisted that a mistake had been made and that others were far more deserving of the honor than he. Yet Camus was already recognized around the world as the voice of a generation-a status he had achieved with dizzying speed. He published his first novel, The Stranger, in 1942 and emerged from the war as the spokesperson for the Resistance and, although he consistently rejected the label, for existentialism. Subsequent works of fiction (including the novels The Plague and The Fall), philosophy (notably, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel), drama, and social criticism secured his literary and intellectual reputation. And then on January 4, 1960, three years after accepting the Nobel Prize, he was killed in a car accident.
In a book distinguished by clarity and passion, Robert Zaretsky considers why Albert Camus mattered in his own lifetime and continues to matter today, focusing on key moments that shaped Camus’s development as a writer, a public intellectual, and a man. Each chapter is devoted to a specific event: Camus’s visit to Kabylia in 1939 to report on the conditions of the local Berber tribes; his decision in 1945 to sign a petition to commute the death sentence of collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach; his famous quarrel with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 over the nature of communism; and his silence about the war in Algeria in 1956.
Both engaged and engaging, Albert Camus: Elements of a Life is a searching companion to a profoundly moral and lucid writer whose works provide a guide for those perplexed by the absurdity of the human condition and the world’s resistance to meaning.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 本书聚焦加缪作为一位作家、一位知识分子，以及作为一个人的四个重要事件，截取了加缪作为记者、审判者、论战者、缄默者的四种身份，思考了阿尔贝·加缪何以能代表一个时代的声音，又何以对今天的我们仍然重要。
与其他加缪传记不同的是，本书从“生命要素”这一概念出发，选取了加缪人生中的几个影响重大的转折点，并以“倾听”的方式——从事件与证据中倾听展开描述，并试图解答围绕在加缪身上的疑问和争议。这是关于阿尔贝·加缪最简洁有力的思想传记，为所有困惑于人类荒诞处境的人提供了道德生活的范本。(JD)
Awards/获奖情况：这本书是一本“加缪的生命观念史”，选取了加缪生命中的几个事件与侧面，为读者展现他与某些思想观念做斗争的过程，特别是与道德观念。作者从事件与证据中倾听，并试图解答围绕在加缪身上的疑问和争议，同时保留自己发出批判性意见的权利，是为一种谨慎而新颖的传记写法。
全书观念碰撞，内容丰富。以事件为线索，以观念为核心，本书回顾加缪一生中的四个重要事件之外，作者精要地勾勒出当时围绕在加缪身边的人物群像，比如萨特、莫里亚克、波伏娃等人。
同济大学人文学院副教授、哲学博士张念老师特地为本书撰写中文版导读。本书篇幅短小精炼，易于阅读。封面设计抽象处理，跳脱以往与加缪有关的书籍之俗套，精装和双封面设计，适合收藏。
这些年来，关于加缪的意义，我的一个始终不变的理解是：直到1960年去世之前，他始终在和某些特定的观念做斗争，并和他的读者分享这场斗争。
如果存在某种学者和非学者共同拥有的信念，那就是在我们的知识生活和伦理生活里，加缪仍然是一个不可或缺的伙伴。极少有作家像他一样，作为一个为他自己的生命、也为我们的生命写作的人，展现在我们面前。
——罗伯特·泽拉塔斯基
Zaretsky (French history, Univ. of Houston) has penned a solid account of one of the giants of French literature. Colleges and universities with strong French programs should definitely buy; it will also appeal to lay readers interested in 20th-century French literature."--Library Journal, March 2010
"This elegantly written and beautifully paced book will appeal to many readers. Those already in sympathy with Camus’s ideas will find extra nourishment; his detractors may want to nuance their criticisms in the light of Zaretsky’s contribution, while those who are not familiar with Camus will have to look hard to find a clearer and more stimulating introduction to the man and his perception of the world."—David Drake, Times Literary Supplement, March 26, 2010
"A striking book.... One of the great benefits of examining Camus’s life through a sequence of key encounters is that it emphasizes the combative, situated nature of his work, and Zaretsky’s choice of key elements is perfect. The chaos of empirical details that so often overwhelms the biographer or historian is thereby given an order and intellectual integrity that may otherwise be dissolved by the corrosiveness of raw facts. These vignettes enable Zaretsky to bring out Camus’s extreme attentiveness and responsiveness to the warring forces that emerge in particular locales; Camus expresses himself differently in accordance with those situational demands. Zaretsky shows how the diverse forms taken by Camus’s work always have a specific ethical import, and the ways in which they don’t say things prove as significant as their positive assertions."--Justin Clemens, The Australian, 17 April 2010
About the Author/作者介绍： Robert Zaretsky，休斯頓大學榮譽學院法國史教授；著有多部作品，包含 Nimes at War、Cock and Bull Stories: Folco de Baroncelli 以及 the Invention of the Camargue。他並參與編寫 The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding 一書。Robert Zaretsky is Professor of French History in the Honors College of the University of Houston. He is author of several books, including Nimes at War and Cock and Bull Stories: Folco de Baroncelli and the Invention of the Camargue. Most recently, he is coauthor of The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding.
Format:HARDCOVER
Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE
Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE
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