It drives you mad, the sun. Or so they tell me, but personally I can’t get enough of it. But then I don’t live in 1940s Algiers like Albert Camus did.
His novel L’Étranger – “The Stranger”, now adapted for film by François Ozon – abides in constant solar imagery and references: “the blazing sun that made the landscape shimmer”, “it was still the same bright, sun-drenched countryside”, “the day, already full of sunshine, hit me like a slap”.
Camus was a writer of brutal honesty, both about the injustices of the world around him and about the reality of himself. Brought up in French Algeria, a society of sun, sand and racial tension, he was willing to confront its injustices but was also in love with the land of his birth. As he said forthrightly when accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before I will defend justice.” It is perhaps just such nuanced realism that has made Camus, a man of the Left, so receivable across the literary spectrum. Indeed, a now-dead friend of mine raised in Northern Rhodesia pointed out L’Étranger was a staple of French classes in British colonial schools (although by then white schoolteachers were, in a sense, the liberal clerisy of these late colonial societies).
