Imagining the past between the lines of Albert Camus Emmanuel Rubben, Kaddish pour un orphelin célèbre et un matelot inconnu, Paris, Sonneur, 2013

One would think of an exercise in style: rewriting an era through the pen of Albert Camus and entrusting him with a narrator. We match the story to a literary monument and refigure the past by giving it a certain depth. It is nothing of the sort. Emmanuel Ruben continues through his second novel exploring a style of literature in the service of geographical, historical and cultural empathy. The narrator of the book reclaims a parentage to better imagine a time with his desires and horrors, a time suspended between several wars when geographical and intimate territories are recomposed. The reader is reading the book like The Fall with an extremely fine use of the indirect discourse free to transform the edge of this monologue into essential dialogue. In this passage, we sense how the narrator reconstructs through the typical imperfect tense of unfinished trials into the past historic tense evoking the scandal of the end of the Third Republic. Because in reality, the book by Emmanuel Ruben profoundly recounts a history of Algeria and France, colonization justified by the Republican ideology and Algerian independence. The reader navigates with the reliefs of the collective memory and clings to some of the islands of our Mediterranean history. The text is riddled with questions to know who was the grandfather gone too fast. It is not so much a question of imagining a story based on a parentage where inheritance has not been allocated. This novel explores the nooks and crannies of an historic epoch because of the scandal about this non-transmission. The inversion of the adverb “too soon’ with the addition of nominal sentences plunges us directly into the absurdity of this death, which left little trace. Paradoxically, this absence forms the very condition for the reconstruction of a story without narrator. This incipit refers explicitly in the book to that of The Stranger. The anaphor is rich because it highlights the echo of this absurd shot. And the reader understands that the unknown grandfather is this stranger so close, so close, holding on to a few lines of a story bursting with curiosity. The imagined figure of the grandfather reading Camus gives a very interesting effect of mise en abyme. The narrator restores youth of the grandfather with signatures found in the books of Camus. The mother becomes the mediator of this reading for generations. The astute reader might see a delicate hint of the Mots by Jean-Paul Sartre deciphering book covers in the corner of the family library. Who has not walked across these places by extracting the precious book, the one that sometimes says more about the reader than the author? The library then becomes a significant metonymy revealing the reader grandfather. The presence of the books read by the narrator’s mother reflects values, concepts, ideas, desires, wants, aversions. Tell me what you read and I will tell you who you are. And in an incredible verve, the story skips over a tangible history of the Mediterranean by restoring happily and plainly the relationship between France and Algeria. The chronology of the political events, the declarations of Guy Mollet, the independence of Algeria, everything is linked together in the edition of the books of Camus. Finally, there is a question remaining open in the consciousness of the reader that I am: this absurd figure of the grandfather is it a fabrication of hybrid figures of the books Camus? Is there an ingenious composition of The Rebel, of The Stranger, of The Fall and of Nuptials? Fundamentally, this novel is the second volume of a personal …