A study in alienation

Looking for the Outsider is the biography of a novel, from conception through publication to critical reception. Alice Kaplan’s life-story of L’Étranger (The Outsider in English translations, The Stranger in American) is a lovely work, lucid and thought-provoking. It makes one feel afresh the sheer strangeness of Albert Camus’s imagination.

All genius is, perhaps, freakish; but Camus’s sprang from peculiarly unpromising soil. He was born in a white working-class area of Algiers. His father was killed in the battle of the Marne before he was one. His mother was deaf and illiterate, with a vocabulary of about 400 words; she worked as a cleaner. His uncle was also deaf and nearly mute, and made barrels. They were impoverished even by the low standards of the other petits colons.

In this silent household, ‘whose limited language favoured a world of objects rather than abstractions’, Camus was an anomaly. School gave him his chance. He was spotted at primary school, and sent on to secondary lycée, into ‘a totally unfamiliar environment’, where he met his first mentor, Jean Grenier. But at 17, he began to cough blood, and was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Camus, the working-class colonial, was a lifelong outsider to mainstream French culture, even though he rapidly penetrated to the centre of the fashionable literary scene. What critics did not like in him, he once remarked, was ‘the Algerian’ (‘Ce qu’ils n’amiaient pas en lui, c’était l’Algérien’). Transplanted to Paris, he missed above all the sun and the sea — overwhelming forces in L’Étranger.

Kaplan’s history charts the success of Camus’s debut novel, which is an astonishing tale. It was published in the most unpropitious circumstances, during the Nazi Occupation. His wily publisher, Gallimard, flitted round the country scavenging for paper.