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Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus

2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scr.2016.0018

1549-3377

Anne Quinney,

North African History and Literature

Reviewed by: Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus Anne Quinney (bio) Algerian Chronicles, by Albert Camus. Trans Arthur Goldhammer. Intro by Alice Kaplan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2014. ISBN 978-0674416758. 240 pp. $15.95 (PB); $21.95 (HC). Originally published in 1958 as Actuelles III, Camus’ reflections on the crisis in Algeria have finally become available in their entirety to English-speaking readers. This edition also contains other, more obscure texts that were not included in the original French edition of 1958. There is a letter Camus wrote to Le Monde in 1953 expressing outrage and sadness over the violent end to a demonstration by Algerian workers at the Place de la Nation, two letters to then Président René Coty requesting pardons for death-row Algerian prisoners and a corrected account of a famously misquoted, and thus misunderstood, episode “The Nobel Prize Conference Incident” of December 1957 when an Algerian student confronted Camus in Stockholm. Camus’ inaugural lecture at the Maison de la Culture from 1937 also appears for the first time in translation and is particularly of interest to those followers of Camus intrigued by his notion of a pan-Mediterranean cultural identity. Arthur Goldhammer’s deft and graceful translation makes this volume a seamless, fluid read; however, we should also note that he has retranslated with greater acuity selections from the Algerian Chronicles that were previously translated in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1961). A section of the volume represents articles Camus wrote for Combat in May of 1945. In the aftermath of the Second World War when a beleaguered France was preoccupied with its own devastation, Camus took up the cause of Algeria with a prescient view of its future in the decades to come. First his outrage at the shocking level of famine and the disastrous economic situation in Algeria and then his full-scale comprehension of Arab hostility to the French presence there and unjust French policies lead Camus to recognize the failure of a policy of assimilation. Yet he still believed in the possibility of peaceful coexistence so much was his love for his native Algeria clouding his vision of the imminent reality of strife: “when the interests of Algeria and France coincide, then you can be sure that hearts and minds will soon follow.” The articles published ten years later in l’Express are darker and yet speak more soberly of the urgency to end the violence. They culminate in the “call for a civilian truce” which caused the very public rift from Sartre in the years leading up to Algerian independence. There is an endearing quality to these essays that reveal the humanist Camus in ways even his short stories and novels fail to impart. In his effort to understand the basic needs of the Kabyle people in “Misery in Kabylia” for example, he acknowledges that he is culturally programmed to be blind to their desire for [End Page 96] self-rule and self-determination. Yet the publication of this article led in part to Alger républicain’s demise and then to Camus’ move abroad where he could once again find employment. He took serious risks as a journalist—risks that in the end only served to isolate him from the Parisian intelligentsia— that a reader of his fiction would have missed prior to the translation of these pieces. To say his views were unpopular at the time would be an understatement, however, the force of his convictions as articulated over the span of almost twenty years remains consistant and his critical analysis of the prejudices and ignorance of the French government vis-à-vis the crisis in Algeria, not to mention his thoughts on terror, only grows more relevant for us today. [End Page 97] Anne Quinney The University of Mississippi Anne Quinney ANNE QUINNEY is Professor of French at the University of Mississippi. Her publications include articles on writers Dumas, Ionesco, Blanchot, Sartre, Camus and Duras, and two books, Le goût de la révolte and Paris—Bucharest, Bucharest—Paris: Francophone writers from Romania, and a translation of J.B. Pontalis’ autobiographical work, Fenêtres. Copyright © 2016 South Central Review