Exile and the Kingdom

Összefoglaló

Four of these stories are set on the shimmering desert fringes of Albert Camus' native Algeria, and all of them first appeared in 1957, the year when he became the youngest French writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man’s perpetual search for an inner kingdom in which to be reborn. They display Camus at the height of his powers.