KOESTLER, UMA VIDA DO SÉCULO XX

"Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness", é o título de um artigo acabado de sair no suplemento de livros do "The New York Times". Sendo seu autor é Christopher Caldwell, trata-se de uma recensão do livro "The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic." de Michael Scammell, (Random House), uma nova biografia do escritor húngaro Arthur Koestler, autor de The Sleepwalkers ("Os Sonâmbulos"), uma notável história da astronomia. Contar a vida dele, com o fim trágico que é conhecido, é contar a história do século passado.

Inicia-se assim:

No other writer of the 20th century had Arthur Koestler’s knack for doing odd things, crossing paths with important people and being present when disaster struck. As a 27-year-old Communist he spent the famine winter of 1932-33 in Khar­kov, amid millions of starving Ukrainians. Rushing southward through France ahead of the invading Nazi armies in 1940, he ran into the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who shared with him half the morphine tablets Benjamin would use, weeks later, to commit suicide. The Harvard drug guru Timothy Leary gave Koestler psilocybin in the mid-1960s, and Margaret Thatcher solicited his advice in her 1979 election campaign. Simone de Beauvoir slept with him but came to hate him, and in a fictional portrait described a blazing intelligence and a personality capable of sweeping people off their feet.

E o resto pode ser lido no link indicado no cimo.

Na imagem: Koestler em 1931 numa viagem ao pólo Norte a bordo de um Zeppelin.