New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Romain Rolland by Stefan Zweig

The Great War of 1914-18 had been raging in Europe and other parts of the world for over a year, when in December 1915 the little known French writer Romain Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings”. In reality, he may have been chosen because in his work he advocated peace and stood up against warmongers in his own as well as other countries. Just a few years later, in 1921, the by then already renowned Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) portrayed the Nobel Prize laureate who was also his friend in the book Romain Rolland. The Man and His Work. But the biography isn’t a usual one because Stefan Zweig focuses on the artistic mission or rather vocation that his gifted friend felt in him from an early age and that he was determined to live although it meant sacrifice and even exile for a while.

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Book Review: The Tree of Man by Patrick White

2016 review of a book written

by an author whose family name starts with the letter

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Everyday life with its inevitable, often annoying routine is what most of us gladly pass over in silence because it doesn’t seem worthwhile to lose a word about it or just a thought. Nonetheless, the greatest part of human existence is made up of it and at least sometimes we wonder whether there isn’t some unexpected meaning or purpose behind it all – like a secret plan of God or Destiny or whatever other seminal power. The Tree of Man by Patrick White, the Australian Nobel Prize-laureate in Literature of 1973, tells the story of a man who leads just the ordinary life of a hard-working farmer with wife, son and daughter in a changing world. He does what needs to be done and accepts all vicissitudes – joys as well as trials – with apparent stoicism although inwardly he wrestles all his life to reach a deeper understanding and find God.