Volume 45, Number 1 · January 15, 1998
High Flier
By Al Alvarez
Burning the Days: Recollection
by James Salter
Random House, 365 pp., $24.00
Camus once said—I think he was writing about Nietzsche—that it is possible to spend a life of wild excitement without ever leaving your desk. The life of the mind, he meant, can be as risky and challenging as any heroic enterprise. Beckett in his room, listening to his voices, following the black thread of his depression wherever it led, purifying it, refining it over and over again, was as heroic in his persistence as Shackleton and his companions rowing their open boat across the Scott Sea from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
Review, 3462 words
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