They Were Coming for Him
On January 4, 1960, Nobel Laureate, existentialist thinker, and dedicated pacifist Albert Camus died in a tragic, and highly suspicious, car accident. Camus was just forty-six years old.
Berta Vias Mahou’s sensitive and probing novel combines fact, fiction, and excerpts from Camus’s own writings to illuminate the French-Algerian writer’s life and death through the story of his alter ego, Jacques.
Growing up amidst the violence in Algiers, young Jacques is haunted by recurring nightmares of his own death by execution. Even awake, he imagines the feel of the forty-five pound blade dropping to sever skin, nerves, bones and arteries.
As a writer, Jacques’s outspoken stance for peace and justice has put him at odds with the powers that be. With Stalin and Franco in control and Algeria fighting for independence from France, the simplest of words and phrases “cost their weight in freedom and blood,” and even fictional works could end up spelling death. Spies could be anywhere, and Jacques is aware that his executioners could come for him at any time. Death threats increased after his last visit to Algiers, where his proposals for reconciliation made him enemies on all sides.
This thoughtful, if somewhat slow-moving, story holds messages for us today, among them that the “practice of goading people on in their antagonism of one another” is both abhorrent and dangerous and that what will remain of most of our precious lives are impalpable memories, “the weightless ash of a butterfly wing consumed in a forest fire.”
Reviewed by
Kristine Morris
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
