Meaningless I don’t understand critics who say Camus is lucid and clear.

We know that his premonition of hyperbole or whatever it is, is going to be horribly fulfilled. When he writes that:Įverything here calls for solitude and the blood of young men It makes his casually extreme or violent references seem… irresponsible. Camus obviously didn’t know anything about these – but we do. ‘Like a wound’? Is a city like a wound? In what possible way?Īhistorical Mention of wounds immediately puts me in mind of the atrocities committed during the eight year Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), and then the appallingly violent civil war of the 1990s. Is Algiers a mouth? (No) Do mouths always open to the sky? (No). But Algiers (together with certain other privileged places such as cities on the sea) opens to the sky like a mouth or a wound. Old walled towns like Paris, Prague, and even Florence are closed in on themselves and hence limit the world that belongs to them. Over the top imagery, hyperbole, a histrionic tone. The loves we share with a city are often secret loves. These include:Īrresting phraseology which, upon reflection, is questionable if not meaningless. At just 12 pages long it’s a brief, impressionistic depiction of his home town, which already displays key aspects of his style. Summer in Algiers (1936)īorn in 1913, Camus was 26 when this piece was published. The Penguin paperback edition of The Myth of Sisyphus is pads out the title essay with five essays which span Camus’s writing career. These are much shorter than Sisyphus and give free rein to Camus’s taste for sensual impressionism laced with philosophising.

Camus essay the myth of sisyphus