Joanna Kavenna at Literary Review:
There’s a surreal television interview with Camus at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris, during a football match between Racing Club de Paris and AS Monaco. It’s 1957 and Camus has recently won the Nobel Prize. The interviewer asks for a few thoughts from Camus on why he won. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ says Camus. ‘I’m not privy to the secrets of the Swedish Academy. But there are two or three writers who deserved the prize before me.’ He’s also invited to criticise the Racing Club goalkeeper. A former goalkeeper himself (for the Racing Universitaire d’Alger), Camus says, ‘Don’t blame him. If you were out there in the middle you’d realise how difficult it is.’ Notable aspects of this interview are: Camus’s diffident charm, how he never stops watching the game, how he seems more interested in football than in speaking of the Nobel. The same wry, self-deprecating tone courses through his notebooks, the same natural gift for aphorisms. The notebooks were published in French between 1962 and 1989; previous English translations have appeared, including by Philip Thody. Now, they have been published for the first time in a single volume, beautifully translated by the author and scholar Ryan Bloom.
more here.
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