SOURCE: "A Pair of Despairers," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4437, April 15-21, 1988, p. 416.

[Weightman is an English educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he presents a mixed assessment of La quête intermittente.]

Iordan Chimet on Ionesco:

Ever since his earliest writings, Ionesco has condemned, in vicious metaphors, modern man's spiritual agony…. A prophet, a Cassandra reborn in an agonizing age, Ionesco will predict disaster in each of his works—not the disasters of an unforeseeable future, but those of the present time. 'Apocalypse according to Ionesco' does not depict a possible Inferno, but the real everyday inferno which is part of the human being…. Death is the only truth, the only certainty. Life continues to be man's only chance of reaching Paradise, but life deprived of spirit becomes more and more a part of Hell. I, for one, do not think that this is Ionesco's...