Albert Camus centenary goes without much honour at home
Neither France nor Algeria pay much attention to 100th anniversary, leaving job to Google
French leave Camus … but Google doodles support
Last month, the 300th anniversary of Denis Diderot's birth
prompted François Hollande to talk of reburying his bones in the
Panthéon, the shrine of national heroes. Thursday's centenary of Albert Camus'
birth, in contrast, has not seen the kind of festivities you might
expect, either in the French capital or his childhood home, Algiers.
The
lead role in feting him in France was reportedly assigned to Marseille,
one of the current European capitals of culture, and a reasonable
choice as Camus bought a house in Provence (which faces Algeria across
the Mediterranean) two years before his death in a car crash in 1960,
and is buried there. But, whether due to cock-up or conspiracy, Marseille-Provence 2013
has been as grudging as Paris in what it has offered by way of
celebration. Camus was hence robbed of a big national "hommage", noted Le Point magazine, but at least "took the most beautiful of revenges on Google", which honoured him with its Doodle on Thursday.
Although
The Outsider and The Plague are both set in Algeria, a full-blown Camus
anniversary tribute there was always less likely. He came from a
pied-noir (European settler) family, put the killing of an Arab at the
centre of his best-known novel, and was (rightly or wrongly) seen as
siding with France in his writings on the postwar independence struggle;
as a result, "not a single official commemoration" took place in his
native country, following the authorities' ban in 2010 on plans to mark
the 50th anniversary of his death.
The continent as a whole
has disowned him, in fact: although he was the first African-born Nobel
literature laureate – and the second African-born laureate across all
categories – the African Union's website's list of "Africa and diaspora"
Nobel winners omits him, while welcoming Toni Morrison and Gabriel
García Márquez as members of the diaspora.
For Algerians,
the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy championed him when president – in
unsuccessfully urging the transfer of Camus' body to the Panthéon, he
was in effect appropriating him as French, not Algerian or Mediterranean
– can't have helped. So on his 100th birthday, Camus was again an
outsider, without a proper cake and belonging fully to neither. Which
may be exactly what he would have wanted.
IN BRIEF: n. - Anyone who does not belong in the environment in which they are found More unfamiliar, unknown, odd, or extraordinary.
No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. — Anna Akhmatova, Source: Requiem, composed mainly 1935-1940, Epigraph, composed 1961.
His essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942, tr. The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955) formulates his theory of the absurd and is the philosophical basis of his novel L'Étranger (1942, tr. The Stranger, 1946) and of his plays Le Malentendu (1944, tr. Cross Purpose, 1948) and Caligula (1944, tr. 1948).
The Stranger or The Outsider, (L’Étranger) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1942. This is perhaps Camus' best-known work, as well as a key text of twentieth-century philosophy. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of existentialism, though Camus did not consider himself an existentialist; in fact, its content explores various philosophical schools of thought, including (most prominently and specifically) absurdism, as well as determinism, nihilism, naturalism, and stoicism.
The title character is Meursault, a French man (characterised by being largely emotionally detached, innately passive, and anomic) who seemingly irrationally kills an Arab man whom he recognizes in French Algiers. The story is divided into Parts One and Two: Meursault's first-person narrativeview before and after the murder.
其實，打從籌備階段開始，電影版的《異鄉人》就注定命運乖舛。莫梭一角，維斯康堤原本屬意亞蘭．德倫，但製片勞倫蒂斯（Dino de Laurentis）卻堅持起用馬斯楚亞尼。改編方面，維斯康堤主張「自由的改編」，突出法屬阿爾及利亞族群間漸升的衝突，但卡繆的未亡人則堅持「忠實的改編」，要求影片必須逐句追隨原著。
![一大早起來，從麥田臉書發現今天@[201100959979792:274:Albert Camus]百歲冥誕。
又看到google的doodle是 Sisyphe 推巨石的圖案。
特地上wiki又看了一遍《異鄉人》大綱。
《異鄉人》這本小說是我念大二時上翻譯課的「教科書」。這本書不難懂（我指文法、句型、辭彙），更不難看（我指內容）。
生命中的點點滴滴，充滿了種種巧合也好、荒謬也罷、無能為力也行。不管你願不願意，我們就是存在，此時此地。其實，我們的選擇並不多。
所以...讓我們繼續...過下去。](https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/s403x403/64239_360469797422150_1315833790_n.jpg)
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