In the 60's, when nobody went to school, everything, including literature, was pop-politicized. Thus in the 50's we were taught that when Meursault, in Albert Camus's The Stranger, kills the Arab, he is really killing is mother. An Absurd Death Five years later, he published The Stranger. Fifteen years after that, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He should probably be permitted the canonical word on what he thought he was writing.
All consolations are vain, even under the African sun.
To die, by accident, at age 47 in a sports car driven by your publisher, is obviously absurd. Mr. Lottman, who has been reporting from Paris on the European literary scene for many years in the pages of Publishers Weekly and The New York Times Book Review, has also been writing this book for many years. His industry staggers. He has read everything and talked to everybody, including enemies. In several respects, Mr. Lottman knows more about Camus than Camus knew about himself.