Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Dead Men Write No Novels


A nice piece in New York magazine by Sam Anderson reviews Elizabeth Hawes's new biography of Albert Camus, Camus: A Romance.

I once saw Jacques Derrida, for instance—the reigning high priest of French theory, a man so intimidatingly abstract I imagined he pooped exegeses—shuffle out of a lecture hall and load his papers not (as I’d expected) into a rickshaw pulled by grad students or onto the shoulders of cynical chain-smoking French angels but into the trunk of a bright-red Daewoo sedan—a car as terminally lame as any my family had ever owned, and which he then proceeded to drive slowly across a parking lot indistinguishable from the anti-intellectual parking lots of my youth.

No comments: