Title: The story of Sirio
Description: Each new generation makes its own inquiry into the meaning of life, but never more so in recent years has the search for something to do with oneself led young people into extreme, violent, and contradictory experiences. In the Story of Sirio Camon constructs a parable where the young heroes are shown advancing through the successive phases of a typical via crucis: here we see the middle class boy at home, enveloped in the middle class dream, and invited to put his life into the service of production and expression; here he is a runaway from home and living in the other world of society's rebels; here we see him enter into the world of romantic love; and here into the artifical paradise of drugs. And finally we see him, now part of an encounter group made up of his peers, undertaking that painful and grave effort at self-analysis, that effort to know oneself which, for Camon, must precede any meaningful effort at social revolution. Each new period must rewrite its Siddhartha, redraft its educational and inspirational handbook for the new generation. The Story of Sirio may be that book for the period we have just emerged from and for the other that is opening now.
Subjects: New York Times reviewed, Fiction, general, Life change events, Fiction