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A review by eriknoteric
Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus
2.0
After reading the "Algerian Chronicles," one can only assume that an editor at some publishing house looking to make a quick buck saw the opportunity to publish a collection of essays written over the course of 10 years by Albert Camus in order to profit off the marketability of an established writer's name. The problem: this collection of journalistic engagements with the French colonization of Algeria was a weary combination of de-contextualized op-ed pieces and historically specific political writings.
In this collection, Camus engages thoughtfully with the problems faced by the French occupation of Algeria during the post-war era. While his thoughtful connections certainly were enlightening and carried a significant amount of meaning, most of this meaning was lost by the utter lack of context for a contemporary reader engaging with the Algerian crisis.
While this book may be both important and interesting for a scholar of French colonial or North African history, for the average lay reader who is merely interested in a topical engagement with the crisis or who is looking for an engagement similar to George Orwell's engagement with similar topics in his own spatio or temporal contexts, "Algerian Chronicles" will leave you both bored and befuddled. This book would have been improved significantly by (1) an intense editorial abridging in which all the hyper-contextual engagements were explained and spelled out in detail or (2) because the world of publishing seems to sometimes be empowered by profit margins, not being published as a collection of works at all. While the "Algerian Chronicles" was certainly an interesting read on several counts, it failed from the beginning because these news articles should have remained what they were: individual, journalistic retellings left in the archives for historians to explore and explain.
In this collection, Camus engages thoughtfully with the problems faced by the French occupation of Algeria during the post-war era. While his thoughtful connections certainly were enlightening and carried a significant amount of meaning, most of this meaning was lost by the utter lack of context for a contemporary reader engaging with the Algerian crisis.
While this book may be both important and interesting for a scholar of French colonial or North African history, for the average lay reader who is merely interested in a topical engagement with the crisis or who is looking for an engagement similar to George Orwell's engagement with similar topics in his own spatio or temporal contexts, "Algerian Chronicles" will leave you both bored and befuddled. This book would have been improved significantly by (1) an intense editorial abridging in which all the hyper-contextual engagements were explained and spelled out in detail or (2) because the world of publishing seems to sometimes be empowered by profit margins, not being published as a collection of works at all. While the "Algerian Chronicles" was certainly an interesting read on several counts, it failed from the beginning because these news articles should have remained what they were: individual, journalistic retellings left in the archives for historians to explore and explain.