Imagining the past between the lines of Albert Camus

About the Book

Emmanuel Ruben’s second novel explores literature as a means to cultivate geographical, historical, and cultural empathy. The narrator reconstructs a familial past to imagine an era suspended between wars, where personal and collective territories are reshaped. The prose mirrors The Fall, employing free indirect discourse to transform monologue into essential dialogue.

Through the narrator’s voice, the novel interrogates the legacy of the Third Republic—its colonial justifications, its contradictions, and its collapse. A passage evokes the scandal of its end:

“Yes, I suppose so if you were a communist or fellow traveller, that you had had enough of this Third Republic which was not that of your Berber or Leghorn ancestors. And I imagine you hardly regretted the fall of the revanchist or imperialist Third Republic, born on a massacre, built on the back of coolies, defended on all seas, gunner of Annam and Tonkin, handling the Sword and the Cross, but which soon bleeds before Verdun and ends up committing suicide with a vote of 569 to 80 in front of Pétain.”

The novel delves into the intertwined histories of Algeria and France, colonization, and Algerian independence, navigating the collective memory of the Mediterranean. The narrator grapples with the absence of a grandfather lost too soon, a figure whose death echoes the absurdity of The Stranger:

“How? This is how you are gone too soon! PAN, at close range. Through a shot. That leaves me no time to know you. But it is still heard—PAN, at close range—at night.”

This absence becomes the condition for reconstructing a story without a narrator, as the incipit explicitly references Camus’ work:

“Fifteen years to understand the first word of this incipit punch, fifteen years to understand the second word, fifteen years to hear, at the end of the first part, the shot.”

The anaphor underscores the echo of this absurd shot, framing the grandfather as a stranger whose story is pieced together through fragments.

Literary and Historical Exploration

The imagined figure of the grandfather reading Camus creates a mise en abyme, with the narrator tracing his lineage through signatures in Camus’ books. The mother acts as a mediator, her youthful discovery of Nuptials and Summer preserved in a 1968 edition:

“Here we are a few years ago, I remember, I tore out of a corner of the nursery library a very small book; the somewhat strange title often taking me aback that announced the cover, of a lavender blue since it was reviewed: Nuptials, followed by Summer. Edition of 68. Your name, the first name of mother read in blue ink on the cover page. She was not even fifteen, she was a student in a Girls’ High School; this very small book she kept secret, from the curious, I am pleased to imagine that it was presented to her at a prize-giving ceremony for excellence; I heard her climbing over the podium with polished parquet to the jury of old Catholic sisters; I see her white-gloved little hand up to receive this little book signed.”

The family library becomes a metonymy for the grandfather’s identity, revealing values, desires, and aversions. The novel skips across Mediterranean history, reframing the relationship between France and Algeria:

“It is not France losing Algeria, nor Algeria losing France. France won the Étoile d’Alger, the Nour pastry, the Ibrahim butchery, the Djoua restaurant, the honey cigars, the kesra, the makroud, the bradj; France won the Kabyle cafes of the passage of the King of Algiers; France won the smile of the spice merchants, Ornano Boulevard, weighing you and serving you, at his stall of abundance, olives, halva, fresh dates, Yes, absolutely my brother, the most recent harvest my brother, with a huge smile at this cheerful, warm French.”

The chronology of political events—Guy Mollet’s declarations, Algerian independence—is woven into the fabric of Camus’ works, leaving the reader to question whether the grandfather is a hybrid of Camus’ characters or a figure of historical resonance.

Themes and Influence

This novel is the second volume of a personal history of the Mediterranean, capturing the contradictions of its violent and warm past. Literature becomes a vessel for fragments of history, reflecting the absurdity of daily gestures as explored in The Myth of Sisyphus. The work engages with the non-transmission of history, inviting the reader to confront the gaps in collective memory.