Description

Category:LiteratureLiterary FictionLiterary Fiction-Lfi
Publisher: Ilqa Publications | ISBN: 9789696401766 | Pages: 128

Exile and the Kingdom is a collection of six short stories in which Camus contends that humans are lonely at heart whether they live happy lives in their milieux. There are times when they suddenly realize it and are never the same. An apparently happy wife tries to fathom her true self when she spends a night in a desert; a man loses his tongue in a House of the Fetish; a barrel maker and his laborers are fighting for survival; a French school teacher in Algeria is tasked with conveying an Arab prisoner to the police headquarters; an artist is spending a dream life among his fans; a French engineer helps a Brazilian native carry his colossal burden. Set in Algeria, France and Brazil, these stories are Camus’s masterpieces and rarefied examples of “Absurdism,” as he called his philosophical thought.

About the Author

Justin O’BrienAlbert Camus was a French-Algerian writer, philosopher and journalist. He was born in Mondovi, French Algeria on vember 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.