Eugene Ionesco(19101994), 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 likeThe Bald Soprano, The Chairs, The Killer, Exit the King,and more than two dozen others; theater criticism (collected inNotes and Counter Notes); and this memoir, which critics have compared in spirit and vision to Pascal'sPensées,Milan Kundera'sBook of Laughter and Forgetting, and Kafka's diaries.