The Castaway (Albert Camus)

Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books

Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Arthur Goldhammer Harvard, 224 pp, £11.95, November 2014, ISBN 978 0 674 41675 8

Camus brûlant by Benjamin Stora and Jean-Baptiste Péretié Stock, 109 pp, €12.50, September 2013, ISBN 978 2 234 07482 8

Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud Actes Sud, 155 pp, €19.00, May 2014, ISBN 978 2 330 03372 9

The sun is at last setting on Britain's imperial myth

by Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian

Scuttling away from India in 1947, after plunging the jewel in the crown into a catastrophic partition, "the British", the novelist Paul Scott famously wrote, "came to the end of themselves as they were". The legacy of British rule, and the manner of their departures – civil wars and impoverished nation states locked expensively into antagonism, whether in the Middle East, Africa or the Malay Peninsula – was clearer by the time Scott completed his Raj Quartet in the early 1970s. No more, he believed, could the British allow themselves any soothing illusions about the basis and consequences of their power.

Algerian Chronicles

Algerian Chronicles

By Albert Camus

Edited by Alice Kaplan & translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press 224pp £16.95)

Camus: conflicting opinions

Reviewed by Andrew Hussey, Literary Review

  

For a long time, the accepted wisdom on Albert Camus's response to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) has been that he was a coward. This was the view first promulgated by his former friend and rival Jean-Paul Sartre, who accused Camus of having the 'morality of a boy scout' for refusing to praise the terrorist actions of the Algerian nationalists, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1957, Camus famously stated: 'People are now planting bombs on the tramway of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.' Since then this impassioned statement has been held up by generations of anti-colonialists and academic post-colonialist theorists - including the likes of Edward Said - as proof of Camus's weak-mindedness and vacillating nature and, by extension, colonial arrogance towards Algeria, the land where he was born and grew up in the poorest kind of pied-noir family (pied-noir, 'blackfoot', was the term used to describe French settlers in Algeria on the grounds that they wore 'black shoes').

The Rebel - Albert Camus

Camus, Albert - The Rebel