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As early as 1936, at the age of 23, Camus' identity as a specifically Algerian writer, sensitive to the Mediterranean landscape and to what he called "the unbearable grandeur of this sky choked by the heat" was forged in a short work entitled Noces} Noces on many levels is a love story between author and landscape, a celebration of one man's deeply visceral attachment to his environment, and an homage to the memory of a sun-filled childhood in Oran tainted both by poverty and sickness. For Camus, Algeria was the source of his inspiration. In his novels and short stories he often evoked the landscape of his childhood: the Medi- terranean and its port cities, the Chenoua mountains to the south, the old Roman city at Tipasa, and the surrounding, vast expanse that is home to the Kabyle nomads and Berber shepherds. Although he left Algeria in his late twenties, Camus would always refer to his formative years there as winter-less, as if the sun never ceased to shine upon him. And if the brilliant sun and blue sky dominated the memory of his childhood, certainly the cold and gloomy Parisian skies permeated the setting of his adult life, fortifying his desire for the African heat and light, and augmenting all the more his "nostalgérie."
Noces was Camus' second published work after L'Envers et l'endroit and is rendered in English as "nuptials" although "wedding party" or even "marriage" would have been more precise a translation given the essays' articulation of a rapturous love for a place he felt belonged dis- tinctly to him. They represent a certain youthful and lyrical sensibility, notes Camus in the preface to the English translation, while his friend and contemporary, Brice Parain, considered them his "best work," for "there is more love in these awkward pages than in all those that have followed."2 In this sense, they strike the reader as akin to a wedding vow, a testament to a private and intimate bond to be read publicly-a bond that was physically but never emotionally severed by the move to Paris two years before its publication. What he conveys in Noces is a commitment to maintaining this bond as an internalized landscape even and especially when it is no longer...