Albert Camus
BIOGRAPHY
The Castaway
Jeremy Harding
Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated byArthur Goldhammer
Harvard, 224 pp, £11.95, November 2014, ISBN 978 0 674 41675 8- Camus brûlant by Benjamin Stora and Jean-Baptiste Péretié
Stock, 109 pp, €12.50, September 2013, ISBN 978 2 234 07482 8 - Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud
Actes Sud, 155 pp, €19.00, May 2014, ISBN 978 2 330 03372 9
December 1938 in a large provincial city. It’s the last chance for the council to agree the municipal budget; in the chamber a reporter from the local paper tries to wring a bit of fun from a drab occasion. As a dignitary ploughs through a lengthy preamble, restless councillors begin to doodle (one makes a paper windmill from the minutes of an earlier meeting). A few days later an inquiry opens into a gas explosion caused by a leak in the mains. The same reporter heads for the scene. Here he’s a stickler for detail: medium-sized pipe, weight forty to fifty kilograms, linking the mains to a pressure valve; width of fissure 323 mm. The gas company blames the burst on subsidence but he thinks they may be trying to swing the inquiry in their favour. In February he delivers a mind-numbing tract on grain and grape harvests the previous year. At the end he announces he’ll be back shortly with more of the same once the session on the citrus harvest opens.