Exile and the Kingdom
by Albert Camus
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Book Summary Information
Author: Albert CamusEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-02-13
ISBN: 0307278581
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Exile and the Kingdom
Book Review: A Good Selection of Both Solid and Eclectic Works
Summary: 5 Stars
As a point of reference, I have read most of Camus's major works. The present collection is an interesting mixture of six short stories. The stories are more varied than his novels which tend to reflect his philosophy of the absurd. I thought the present stories were among his best works. The story The Guest is outstanding, two or three of the stories are excellent, and the others are good or are at least interesting.
Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) was a French writer and philosopher. He is often associated with existentialism, but Camus rejected any ideological classification. Camus was a young recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award in 1957. He died in a car crash only three years after receiving the award. He was a social activist and Communist, and fought with the French resistance in WWII. Later he rejected Communism. The present book was copyrighted in 1957.
The present novel contains six works:
- The Adulterous Woman
- The Renegade
- The Silent Men
- The Guest
- The Artist at Work, and
- The Growing Stone.
I had previously read The Guest in other collections of short stories. It is one of his best short works and it it is about an Arab prisoner who had murdered a family member and who is now transferred to a schoolmaster, Daru, at an isolated outpost in the desert of North Africa. Daru is supposed to deliver the prisoner to a jail the next day.
The Silent Men are a group of workers who have returned to work at a barrel factory after a strike, and who are not interested in talking to the boss who stopped the strike. The Artist at Work is about the rise and fall of a young painter. The Growing Stone is about a civil engineer on an assignment in the coastal jungles of South America, while the remaining two are set in desert towns of North Africa, and are the most eclectic and imaginative stories in the group.
The stories are all interesting and I enjoyed the reads.
The Stranger and perhaps The Fall remain as his best works and they are must reads, followed by The Plague. Those works include his use of irony and philosophical views. Also, Camus has written some good drama and non-fiction. The present work shows the broader range of his writing skills and is an entertaining set of stories.
Summary of Exile and the Kingdom
From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man?s perpetual search for an inner kingdom in which to be reborn. They display Camus at the height of his powers.Now, on the 50th anniversary of the book?s publication, Carol Cosman?s new translation recovers a literary treasure for our time.
Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
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