Exile and the Kingdom

Description

The stories of Exile and the Kingdom explore the dilemma of being an outsider – even in one’s own country – and of allegiance. With intense power and lyricism, Camus evokes beautiful but harsh landscapes, whether the shimmering deserts of his native Algeria or the wild, mysterious jungles of Brazil.

Here a Frenchwoman is gradually seduced by the sheer difference of North Africa, a mutilated renegade is driven mad by the cruelty of his own people, and a barrel-maker watches the slow decline of his craft. A kindly teacher must choose between the law and a life, while a modest painter is out of his depth in the hypocrisy of the art world, and a French engineer discovers a new sense of belonging in a distant land.

French novelist, essayist, and playwright. Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work.

Author Biography

Justin O’Brien Albert Camus was a French-Algerian writer, philosopher and journalist. He was born in Mondovi, French Algeria on November 7, 1913. Although not trained as a philosopher, he contributed towards the avant-garde twentieth-century philosophical ideas of Absurdism in the form of essays, novels, reviews and articles. He also became active in the resistance against the colonial French government and served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Combat from 1944 to 1947. Camus established himself as a fiction writer with his three novels: The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956). His philosophical books The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), and The Rebel (1951) proved him to be a forceful thinker. Because of his formidable impact on the world of letters in the second half of the twentieth century, he was awarded the prestigious bel Prize in 1957 for illuminating “the problems of the human conscience.” He was only 44 years old at the time. He died in an automobile accident at the age of 46