Exile and the Kingdom

 ...is what came off the shelves next. 

Six stories perhaps not quite as convincing as his three masterpiece novels but subtle and uncompromising in their Existentialist themes. You wouldn't find many critics calling him sentimental.

Arid and unremitting, like the Algerian sun in L'Etranger, its integrity is in how it never 'begs for pardon' and, checking Louis MacNeice for that quote, suddenly The Sunlight on the Garden is revealed as Existentialist, too..

There are the blazing sun, the dust, the necessity of choice but, ultimately only really death that make Camus so compelling and discomfiting. The language is similarly immediate, unadorned and the stories disarmingly simple but carrying great weight.

Coming so soon after Zola's The Masterpiece, it was impossible not to notice the artist in The Artist at Work being impervious to the love of his wife because he was obsessed by his art. The only difference is that Gilbert Jonas becomes successful and then goes out of fashion whereas Lantier in Zola was ahead of his time but never commercially viable.

The Guest finds Daru, the schoolmaster landed with the responsibility of taking charge of an Arab prisoner but unable to discharge the duty thrust upon him. It's not a situation in which one can remain neutral. He is compromised by doing what his conscience prompts him to do.

The Adulterous Woman is otherwise trapped, like so many fictional wives, with a husband she finds dull but Camus's vignette portrays only the ache and frustration rather than taking on Bovery proportions.

That Camus saw himself more as a theatre man, essayist and activist ahead of novelist only increases one's admiration for his sideline in prose fiction. A far, far better man - by most accounts- than Sartre who might have done brilliant work but wasn't the first or last to find himself unable to relinquish doctrine. Justice was in some ways done in that Camus was the glamorous one and has become, for some of us, some sort of saint. For those of us, that is, who, like him, would neither have saints or want to be one.

 

Looking at the other titles advertised in the back of this book, I have or have read most of them- by Camus, Sartre and Gide but not Simone de Beauvoir. But there's also Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal there so when Exile and the Kingdom returns to the shelves, that will come off them for the first time since it was installed there maybe 25 years ago. If I didn't make use of this resource it would be some sort of grand ornament but no use.