A Novel Imagines the Life of the Man Who Discovered Camus

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/books/review/our-riches-kaouther-adimi.html

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OUR RICHES By Kaouther Adimi

In Algeria I encountered the superlative of blue. On my visit, I stayed briefly in the resort town of Tipaza, where “the eyes try in vain to grasp anything other than the drops of light and color that shimmer at the edge of the lashes,” as Albert Camus wrote rapturously. When I attempted to walk to the seaside, I was intercepted by a police officer, appearing out of nowhere, who advised me that it would be unsafe for me to go that way and directed me back toward my hotel. The pairing of that unbounded landscape of blue, and the restricted lives contained within it, is one of the more bewildering experiences I’ve had. I never got to see Tipaza’s memorial to Camus, which stands along the coastline. It’s inscribed with one of his placidly profound observations, taken from one of his earliest essays, which was written in Tipaza and published in the collection “Nuptials,” in 1938, by the Algerian-French bookseller and printer who “discovered” him, Edmond Charlot.

Charlot, and the bookshop and lending library that he ran in French Algiers from 1936 onward called Les Vraies Richesses (True Riches), are the subject of a new novel, originally published in 2017 in France by Kaouther Adimi, a young Algerian writer. Adimi has altered Charlot’s epithet slightly, but meaningfully, in her own title, “Our Riches.” It’s a smart conceit, not only because the story of Charlot, a member of the interwar Francophone intelligentsia, is intertwined with that of Camus and the capers of his enduringly captivating literary circle, but also because the problem of literature in a colonized state — often wielded as a tool of domination, separating those who could read, let alone write, from those who couldn’t — brings Adimi straight to the heart of modern-day Algeria’s ambivalence about its inheritance, and, not incidentally, of France’s, too.

The real-life Charlot was born in Algiers in 1915, to a family that arrived with the French during the 1830 conquest. There was some mixed heritage among them (a Maltese grandfather), and by the 1930s, feeling himself neither French nor Algerian, Charlot insists that, with his printing press, he will construct a “Mediterranean outlook.” “Land and literature: What could be more important?” Adimi’s fictional Charlot writes.

It’s an idea that will prove unsustainable. Charlot’s father oversees distribution in French Algeria for the publisher Hachette, and siphons off his unsold volumes for his son’s first inventory at his new shop on the Rue Charras (which will later have its name changed to Rue Hamani). Charlot’s first publication is a play about a worker uprising by Camus, the performance of which has been banned by the colonial government. He goes on to print works by some of the most important writers of the era, of French, Algerian, Spanish and Italian heritage, bringing together “people from all around this sea.”

But the life of the shop is frequently disrupted by history — Charlot is thrown in prison by the Vichy regime, then called up to serve in the war effort in mainland France. Once the war is over, the Algerian revolution will force Charlot out of Algeria.

Adimi alternates entries from an invented diary by Charlot with a second, contemporary plotline, in which a student has been hired to clear out the bookstore after the government, which kept it open for decades, decides to close it, in a present-day Algiers infused with a melancholy self-consciousness, that hypnotic blue that obscures an uneasy nation. The writing loses direction at times; characters appear who were never introduced, along with details that are unnecessary and uninteresting. Yet the truly potent effect of the book is that by taking on literary history from the underbelly of the French nation — from the colony just across the sea — Adimi confronts us with episodes that are simply never spoken of in France: the grand celebration of the end of World War II, in May 1945, which, in Algeria, turned into a massacre by the colonial administration; another massacre, this time in Paris, in 1961, of Algerian protesters, who were thrown into the Seine by French police officers.

It is in unhappy nations, we are meant to understand, that history is a relentless companion. “Charlot left something beautiful here, something bigger than everything that was going on outside,” a young Algerian says in 2017, as the shop is being shut down.