The Hermit - Softcover

Ionesco, Eugene

3.78

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Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805001786 ISBN 13: 9780805001785

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1987

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With the help of an unexpected inheritance, a lowly clerk is able to quit his job and spend his time observing people

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From the Publisher:

Ionesco was one of three new playwrights who emerged in early
1950s France - changing the course of modern theatre. None of them French
by birth - the others being Samuel Beckett and Arthur Adamov - it is to the
Romanian born Ionesco that the label 'absurdist' most properly belongs. He
owes a debt to such surrealists as Roger Vitrac and to Luigi Pirandello,
but his work is based partly on the absurdities he found in language - an
experience common to those who grow up with more than one. Another feature
of his work is his ability to relate visual metaphores and exaggerated
stage pictures to enable audiences to appreciate his meanings as much
through their nerves and intuitions as through their eyes and ears. Like
Pirandello, he too exploited his dreams. In one play his hero gradually
sees all his friends turn into Rhinocerouses; in another a body grows in
the next room as a husband and wife squabble until giant feet crash through
the wall; and in still another, a perfectly planned city becomes the
habitat of a motiveless serial killer. Ionesco's plays are extremely
entertaining and funny - never less so than when they end as tragedies -
which they usually do. He differs from Beckett in his lightness of touch,
and from Adamov in his avoidance of political ideology - although some of
his plays have a strong political content. He was extremely eccentric as a
man as well as a playwright - he lived in constant fear; both of losing his
reputation once it had flourished in the late 1950s, and of death. Much of
his work is based on these and other fears. As well as his plays, we also
publish his only novel "The Hermit".

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