Present Past, Past Present: A Personal Memoir »

Eugene Ionesco (1910–1994), a Romanian-born Frenchman, was central to the Theater of the Absurd, a dramatic movement that abandons logical plot development, meaningful dialogue, and intelligible characters, and instead embraces anarchic comedy to convey the meaninglessness of modern man's existence in a universe ruled by chance. Ionesco's many works include: plays like The Bald Soprano, The Chairs, The Killer, Exit the King, and more than two dozen others; theater criticism (collected in Notes and Counter Notes); and this memoir, which critics have compared in spirit and vision to Pascal's Pensées, Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Kafka's diaries.