Content area
Full Text
Exile and the Kingdom, by Albert Camus (Vintage, 2007)
First aired on NPR April 13, 2007
It was 1957,me year m which French writer Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature, when Camus's short-story collection Exile and the Kingdom first appeared in an English translation. Fifty years later, the book has been retranslated, by Carol Cosman, and published in a new paperback edition, with a foreword by recent Nobel winner, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk characterizes the stories as "philosophical" fiction and places Camus himself, rightly so, in the grand company of Dostoevsky and Borges. Half of these stories, the three best I want to say, take place in Camus's native North Africa, and thus in a landscape of blue-andwhite-roofed villages, and sandy and stony deserts and infinite skies. This landscape strikes the eye and weighs on the soul, as Camus...