Word: camus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Douglas Coupland took a big risk in titling his latest short story collection Life After God. After all, the ontological void isn't really a new subject. It seems as if we've been through it all before: the Hemingway version, the Camus version, and countless others. It almost seems presumptuous to try to breathe new life into the subject...
Culture: A mesmerizing encore from Albert Camus...
This initial section of the surviving manuscript, subtitled Search for the Father, achieves a raw, personal poignancy that Camus never allowed himself to show in life. Le Premier Homme also displays Camus's deep, nostalgic affection for the Algeria of his childhood, for the French (the pieds noirs) and other European settlers who went to the North African Mediterranean coast in search of a new world, for what he called in his diary "those luminous years...
...time they were written, such sentiments were heresy to the Left Bank literati and their grand panjandrum, Jean-Paul Sartre. Algeria was racked by violent attempts to liberate itself from colonialism; these would succeed two years after Camus's death. His pained middle position on the Algerian question -- deploring the atrocities committed by both sides -- drew scorn from the right and left, particularly Sartre and his circle, those existentialists who managed to find a place in their theory of limitless freedom for doctrinaire Marxism...
...Camus's refusal to seek sanctuary in such abstractions marked him as an outsider while he lived and a prophet now, in an age of discredited dogmas. Reviewing Le Premier Homme, Paris' Le Monde asked, "Can we now rediscover Camus without political and historical prejudices, in his quest for truth?" The answer will spread with the translations, and it seems...