Laughing Death e-bog

Also the task is to evaluate and assess, and to decide whether the work is a novel, or a book of memoirs, or a parody, or a lampoon, or a variation on imaginative themes, or psychological study; and to establish its predominant characteristics; whether the whole thing is a joke, or whether its importance lies in its deeper meaning, or whether it is just irony, sarcasm, ridicule . . . Witold Gombrowicz in Ferdeydurke After procrastinating for over two years since Yin's death on the writing of this Foreword for his second auto- biographical work, I finally begin using the above quota- tion from Witold Gombrowicz. Yin Zigas was a genius; he was a romatic, he was a physician with compassion, he was a scientist with pene- trating curiosity, he was an actor, and he was a loyal friend. He was fundamentally a stylist. Many who knew him compared him to Don Quixote; the younger genera- tion compared him to Danny Kaye, not only in his appear- ance, but in his speech, movements, and actions. In his first autobiographical essay, Auscultation of Two Worlds, Yin surprised many of his friends by the flamboyant accounts of his dramatic life. I was hard pressed to com- ment on this first work, either to Yin himself or to our mutual friends. Everyone, after all, recognized me as his "e;mentor"e; in those passages, as they did most of his other thinly disguised characters.