Kieran Fogarty
Fed Up with Being Alienated
American Journals
By Albert Camus
Hamish Hamilton 157pp £12.95
Short and fragmented, these are the notebooks of two journeys made by Camus to the United States and Canada in 1946, and to South America in 1949. Forty years later, those dates seem more or less consecutive – but in the context of Camus’s career and increasingly desperate disillusion, the three years seem more like ten. You come to the book gleefully, armed with the hindsight of knowing the author to be enshrined in literary history expecting him to rip into the spiritual cote of the new world with much of traditional prejudice of the old; and you are stopped cold by a writer much younger than history remembers him, locked in struggle for his own soul.
This makes Camus’s initial collision with New York imaginatively awesome. Leaving France, his last image ‘is destroyed buildings at the very edge of wounded earth’. A few days later ‘crossing Broadway in a taxi, tired and feverish. I am literally stupefied by the circus lights. I am just coming out
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm