Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the French absurdist novelist Albert Camus.
Book Review
Exile and the Kingdom, Albert Camus, Vintage Books, New York, 1957
When I was young and not partially wedded to any defined ideology or specific political perspective I was crazy to read, after Jack Kerouac’s be-bop beat books,* the books, especially the short stories of the existentialists and absurdists like Sartre and Camus. Especially, after a certain time, Camus with his dagger-point little bursts of recognizable absurdity about the situational ethics of living a “normal” life in the modern (now post-modern, maybe) world. The world for me after World War II when one the one hand we faced total extinction on any given day (and still do) and unprecedented opportunities to live ten, no, one hundred times better than previous generations.
That living better, if more dangerously, was at a cost though. The cost of being merged into some vast cauldron of moral indifference, moral vacuity, or worst, as Andre Gide was probe to harp on, immorality by putting on blinkers about the fates of the several billions other humans who inhabit the planet. That is the big picture though. What Camus excelled in with his relatively short novels, and here with the selection of short stories, was the dilemmas of confronting everyday life one person at a time- sometimes winning, sometimes losing and sometimes not being quite sure, that last being a fit category for much of modern existence.
In this little book we have describe for us unhappy wives, adulterous or not, mad men and men made mad under the Algerian desert sun , angry men who are lost in a world not of their making but also one in which they have very little say over, a man who tries to do right but in the end is overwhelmed by movements, historically important movements, who finds himself however on the wrong side of history through no fault of his own, an artist who knows fame and its fifteen minutes and non-fame and its eternity, and even a “happy” ending where a man does right in this wicked old world and does not get beat down for it. Although all of these stories took place and were written over one half century ago on my recent re-reading the dilemmas presented seemed very current, very current indeed. The king of the absurdist writers, Albert Camus, writes with verve all through this set. And you wonder why I was crazy to read his stories back in the day.
(*I was reading Jeanbon’s be-bop beat down, beat around, beatitude stuff partially out of affinity to our common mill town, his Lowell, mine Olde Saco, and French-Canadian heritage, if only to spite my mother, nee LeBlanc, who cursed his name every time she saw me bring one of his books into the family house. And if she had seen Sartre or Camus books she probably would have done the same to them although they were not mill town boys and not F-C.)
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