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Looking for the Stranger - Albert Camus by Alice Kaplan: book review




Looking for the Stranger - Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (2016) is a biographical-style account of Algerian author, Albert Camus, as he is writing his famed novel, The Stranger (The Outsider), published in 1942. Kaplan describes it as the biography of the novel (rather than the novelist). The novel is one of alienation, existentialism, and the absurd.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was in his 20s, growing up in poverty, and diagnosed with tuberculosis, but excelling at school. His first job as a crime reporter set the stage for his novel. Kaplan uses the letters and diaries of Camus to reconstruct the events that lifted The Stranger from episodic influences to words on the page.

Camus had the opening sentences since August 1938 and didn’t change a word. Yet his writing policy was to edit, edit, and edit again. In 1939, it was not exactly peace-time, but neither was it war-time. Algiers was under German occupation and censorship. And Camus had a certain amount of ‘literary agitation’ while he was editor-in-chief of the two-page bulletin, Le Soir Republicain, mostly due to the paper shortage.

In 1940 he knew all he needed was a place to write – he moved to Paris to the ‘drabness’ of Montmartre ‘where an artist or writer could get by on almost nothing.’ Although working for the daily paper Paris-Soir, everything was strange to him, where he didn’t know a single person. But ‘the work Camus was doing in that small hotel room would change the history of modern literature.’

Kaplan details his departure from Paris during the German occupation, returning to Oran in 1941. He mailed copies of his manuscript to his university professor, Jean Grenier, and newspaper colleague, Pascal Pia. Kaplan also details their initial feedback. After editing, and publication, Camus had the ‘postpartum blues.’

Kaplan writes of the literary reviews, Camus winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, his death, and his literary acclaim.

Excellent concept and exceptionally well written, but overall it still leaves many gaps in the literary process of one of the most famous and widely read novels in the world. Nevertheless, readers of Camus will like this exploration of a young man, a literary idea, his environment, his influences, and his overwhelming determination to write brilliantly.






MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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