Albert Camus
Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a Franco-Algerian novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, journalist, and philosopher who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, when he was 44 years old. He was the second-youngest to win the Nobel for a life-body of work, the first being Rudyard Kipling in 1907 (Kipling was 41 at the announcement). Camus and Kipling make an interesting coincidental pair, since both of their careers were engagements with colonialism, its consequences tragic or strengthening or both. Camus during his lifetime and certainly after his death was hunted by categorical thinkers to capture, cage, and display him as identified as the representative of this or that -ism. He always eludes them. He was an artist, a political man, a newsman, and a wonderfully complex human being.
I will gradually add associated writers, sometimes friends of his (Beauvoir), sometimes later writers who intertwine a work with Camus’s legacy (Daoud). His too-short life, ended by a car wreck, was in the midst of a dramatic time. I don’t think he would want to be isolated from it or his fellow travelers.
Algerian Chronicles
Algerian Chronicles
More than fifty years after Algerian independence, Albert Camus’ Algerian Chronicles appears here in English for the first time. Published in France in 1958, the same year the Algerian War brought about the collapse of the Fourth French Republic, it is one of Camus’ most political works—an exploration of his commitments to Algeria. Dismissed or disdained at publication, today Algerian Chronicles, with its prescient analysis of the dead end of terrorism, enjoys a new life in Arthur Goldhammer’s elegant translation.
“Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at this moment,” Camus, who was the most visible symbol of France’s troubled relationship with Algeria, writes, “as others feel pain in their lungs.” Gathered here are Camus’ strongest statements on Algeria from the 1930s through the 1950s, revised and supplemented by the author for publication in book form.
In her introduction, Alice Kaplan illuminates the dilemma faced by Camus: he was committed to the defense of those who suffered colonial injustices, yet was unable to support Algerian national sovereignty apart from France. An appendix of lesser-known texts that did not appear in the French edition complements the picture of a moralist who posed questions about violence and counter-violence, national identity, terrorism, and justice that continue to illuminate our contemporary world.