Camus@50

Fifty years after his death, cult existentialist, part-time philosopher, French resistance mascot, football goalkeeper and a bum-chum of Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, remains all about contradictions.

Fifty years after his death, cult existentialist, part-time philosopher, French resistance mascot, football goalkeeper and a bum-chum of Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, remains all about contradictions.

Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature — after Rudyard Kipling.
He died in 1960 in a car crash two years after the award, which he had absurdly predicted. His rise to iconic fame, much like that of James Dean, was not so much for his small oeuvre as it was for his style.

HT Image

This evening, the Embassy of France is marking 50 years of the French-Algerian writer’s passing away. The evening will start with a reading in Hindi of extracts from Caligula, Les Justes (The Just) and La Chute (The Fall), by Jaimini Kumar, followed by the release of the book, Sense of the Sacred: Camus and India, by Shankar Chandra. The book attempts to uncover Camus’ persistent spiritual longing for the absolute. According to Chandra, Camus was greatly inspired by The Gita and The Upanishads, a fact she confirmed when she went to France.

The evening will see a discussion on the legacy of Camus by a panel, comprising two French professors Jean-Yves Guerin and Martine Job, and Chandra, and will be moderated by HT journalist and author Indrajit Hazra.

On Saturday, March 27, 6 pm, at 2 Aurangzeb Road