'politics not as something eagerly chosen for ourselves but as an unhappy accident that we are obliged to accept'

"Albert Camus"
Orhan Pamuk, outro dos capítulos de Other Colors.


“As time goes on, therefore, we cannot remember reading writers without also revisiting the world as we knew it when we first read them and recalling the inchoate longings they awoke in us. When we are attached to a writer, it is not just because he ushered us into a world that continues to haunt us, but because he has in some measure made us who we are, Camus, like Dostoyevsky, like Borges, is for me this kind of elemental writer. Such a writer’s prose ushers one into a landscape waiting to be filled with meaning, suggesting, nonetheless, that any literature with metaphysical designs has – like life – limitless possibilities. These authors, read when you’re young and reasonably hopeful, will inspire you to want to write books as well.

I read Camus sometime before reading Dostoyevsky and Borges, at the age of eighteen, under the influence of my father, a construction engineer. In the 1950s, when Gallimard was publishing one Camus book after another, my father would arrange for them to be sent to Istanbul, if he was not in Paris to buy them himself. Having read the books with great care, he enjoyed discussing them. Though he tried, from time to time, to describe “the philosophy of the absurd” in words I could understand, it was not until much later that I came to understand why it spoke to him: This philosophy came to us not from the great cities of the West, or the interiors of their dramatic architectural monuments and houses, but from a marginalized part-modern, part-Muslim, part-Mediterranean world like ours. The landscape in which Camus sets The Stranger, The Plague, and many of his short stories is the landscape of his own childhood, and his loving, minute descriptions of sunny streets and gardens belong neither to the East nor to the West. There was also Camus the literary legend: My father was an enthralled by his early fame as he was shaken when the news came that he had died, still young and handsome, in a traffic accident the newspapers were only too eager to call “absurd”.
Like everyone else, my father found an aura of youth in Camus’s prose. I sense it still, though the phrase now reflects more than the age and outlook of the author. When I revisit his work now, it seems to me as if Europe in Camus’s books was still a young place, where anything could happen. It is as if its cultures had not yet fissured; as if contemplating the material world you could almost see its essence. This may reflect the postwar optimism, as a victorious France reasserted its central role in world culture and most particularly in literature. For intellectuals from other parts of the world, postwar France was an impossible ideal, not just for its literature but for its history. Today we can see more clearly that it was France’s cultural preeminence that gave existentialism and the philosophy of the absurd such prestige in the literary culture of the 1950s, not just in Europe but also in America and non-Western countries.


It was this kind of youthful optimism that prompted Camus to regard the thoughtless murder of an Arab, by the French hero of The Stranger as a philosophical rather than a colonial problem. So when a brilliant writer with a degree in philosophy speaks of an angry missionary, or an artist grappling with fame, or a lame man mounting a bicycle, or a man going to the beach with his lover, he can spiral off into a dazzling and suggestive metaphysical rumination. In all these stories, he reconstitutes life’s mundane details like an alchemist, transforming its base metals into a filigree of philosophical prose. Underlying it there is, of course, the long history of the French philosophical novel to which Camus, no less than Diderot, belongs. Camus’ singularity lies in his effortless melding of this tradition – which relies on acerbic wit and a slightly pedantic, somewhat authoritarian voice – with short sentences a la Hemingway and realistic narration. Though this collection belongs to the tradition of the philosophical short story comprising Poe and Borges, the stories owe their color, vitality, and atmosphere to Camus the descriptive novelist.

The reader is inevitably struck by two things: the distance between Camus and his subject and his soft, almost whispering mode of narration. It is as if he seems unable to decide whether or not to take his readers deeper into the story and ends up leaving us suspended between the author’s philosophical worries and the text itself. This may be a reflection of the draining, damning problems that Camus encountered in the last years of his life. Some find expression in the opening paragraphs of “The Mute”, when Camus alludes, somewhat self-consciously, to the problems of aging. In another story, “The Artist at Work,” we can sense that Camus at the end of his days was living too intensely and that the burden of fame was too great. But the thing that truly damned and destroyed Camus was without a doubt the Algerian War. As an Algerian Frenchman, he was crushed between his love for this Mediterranean world and his devotion to France. Whereas he understood the reasons for the anti-colonial anger and the violent rebellion it had unleashed, he could not take a hard stance against the French state as Sartre did, because his French friends were being killed by the bombs of Arabs – or “terrorists,” as the French press called them – fighting for independence. And so he chose to say nothing at all. In a touching and compassionate essay he wrote after his old friend’s death, Sartre explored the troubled depths concealed by Camus’s dignified silence.

Pressed to take sides, Camus chose instead to explore his psychological hell in “The Guest.” This perfect political story portrays politics not as something eagerly chosen for ourselves but as an unhappy accident that we are obliged to accept. One finds it difficult to disagree with the characterization.”

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again, a vermelho frases que gostei de ler.
apesar daquilo que acho que são delírios próprios de estar naquele local do mundo (também temos os nossos), encontro nestes livros, especialmente os não ficcionais, muitas das ideias que não expressei antes, outras que não pensei antes, outras onde quase cheguei. não sei se Pamuk fez estudos literários para além das suas leituras ou o seu academismo ficou em arquitectura pois o que escreve parece mais independente do que o costume das sucessivas teorias que correram o academismo literário, escreve como leitor. semelhantes: talvez Manguel, embora este seja profissional da leitura, e Vila-Matas, embora este não chegue nem de perto ao controlo literário da escrita de Pamuk. mas Vila-Matas como Pamuk provocam-me este impulso de ler desbragadamente, de recuperar aquilo que julgo em atraso, de rever locais onde não vou desde a quase juventude, como alguns de Dostoyevsky (Fiódor Dostoiévski, com acentos). ou o desejo tresloucado de ler todo o Camus, os que li há muito tempo, e os que nunca cheguei a ler.

há sempre mais maneiras de olhar para trás e de não ser transformado em estátua de sal (o que podia ser dito sobre a proibição do passado!). um jogo lúdico é dividir a própria vida em autores: a minha fase Mia Couto, a fase Hillerman, a fase sem-literatura, a fase-Beckett, a fase Dostoyevsky, a fase Gogol, a fase Richard Ford, a fase romances de guerra, a fase clássicos do romantismo francês, a fase índia americana, que me alterou a vida. já tinha aqui proposto a arrumação de prateleiras por fases cronológicas, isto seria uma extensão: a arrumação da vida passada em prateleiras de  fases literárias.