Joanna Kavenna at Literary Review:
What an amazing behemoth of a book! I’ve been lugging it around for weeks. Nearly a thousand letters: the intimate correspondence of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès. When they first met in Paris – on D-Day, 1944 – Camus had already published L’Etranger (1942; The Outsider). Born and raised in Algeria, he was in Paris when the Second World War broke out, and later joined the French Resistance. Camus’s wife, Francine Faure, a mathematician and pianist, remained in Algeria. Maria Casarès was originally from Galicia, the daughter of an exiled former prime minister of Spain, Santiago Casares Quiroga. In 1944, Casarès was already known as an actress, having played the titular role in J M Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows. She later starred in Les Enfants du paradis (1945), Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) and La Lectrice (1988), among other films and plays.
On D-Day, Camus was thirty; Casarès was twenty-one. They began an affair, but this ended when Camus was reunited with his wife. In 1945, Faure gave birth to twins: Catherine and Jean. In June 1948, Camus and Casarès met again and embarked on a long relationship, which continued until Camus’s death in a car crash on 4 January 1960.
more here.
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