2023-12-16 14:55:00
How timely this beautiful book is, after the attacks that the author of The Stranger just suffered at the hands of a North Carolina academic who begs us to“forget Camus” (Olivier Gloag, La Fabrique éditions). By charging him with all colonialist crimes and forgetting essential texts like Misery of Kabylia… Yes, how timely it is, this Albert Camus’ love dictionary, that we dreamed of, and that Mohammed Aïssaoui did. He was, it’s true, one step ahead: “No one had lived, writes the journalist and writer, ce that he and I had experienced: the poverty, the dizzying gap between our original environment and the one to which we have reached, the illiterate mother who will never read the books we wrote, the shame, the condescension. » This is what he believed when he was very young before discovering – well, not alone! – that he is part of a global club of Camus lovers, who want everything but to forget him and his unforgettable sentences: “In spring, Tipasa is inhabited by the gods and the gods speak in the sun”(Wedding at Tipasa). In this dictionary, written for, and with, his accomplice Catherine Camus, the writer’s daughter, Mohammed Aïssaoui takes us on a journey through Camusie with jumps and frolics according to the spirit of the collection, from A for “Algeria” (“my true homeland”, said Camus) to C like “Casarès” (which we find at the “Women” entry, which is not far from “Francine”, “Football” and even “FBI”!), and from S like “Soleil” to W like “Simone Weil”. With a few words, Camus’ favorites (“Summer”, “Sea”, “Desert”… noted in a notebook), the author of The Furcy Slave Affair reserves, as he says, a special fate. You will see… And understand why, with Mohammed Aïssaoui and his generous, fine, precise and fraternal book, there is no question, at all, of forgetting Camus.
“Albert Camus’ Lovers’ Dictionary”, by Mohammed Aïssaoui (Plon, 528 p., €28).
#Unforgettable #Camus