Camus' Algeria

I haven’t read Albert Camus since college. It’s time to go back and do some rereading. He was born in Algeria and that is the setting of his major works like LEtranger. He was raised not far from the Arab quarter, close to our office. But the site is rundown and not maintained at all as a literary locale. He knew and loved the landscape of his county of birth, but he regarded himself as French, he wrote for Europeans and he believed in the superiority of French culture over Arab. In the early 1900s when he lived, the French mission in Algeria was to 'to substitute "civilization and common sense for barbarism and fanaticism.” He thought that the idea of a seaparte Algerian nation – something that happened shortly after he died in 1960 – was a bad idea.

L'Etranger was published in 1942 and doesn’t really mention the colonial rule or the Algerian independence movement. The real context may be Nazi occupied France. The book is also anti-Arab. The central even is the murder of an Arab, but there’s no reason for it and the Arab characters all lack personality. There is no Islam in the book.