A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning by Robert Zaretsky

balzacienne de la femme abandonnée; l'absence d'agressivité et d'actions transgressives qui marquent les héroïnes d'"Un cœur simple"de Flaubert et d'Une vie de Maupassant; le caractère anonyme des femmes, la banalité de leurs aventures et leurs imperfections morales,traits communs de la plupart de ces récits; enfin la qualité de muses de ces cœurs simples qui inspirent "une réflexion complexe sur les manières de s'énoncer" (160). Ainsi à la lecture de cet ouvrage pertinent, ce qui ressort de ce petit genre littéraire n'est pas la simplicité de la narration mais sa complexité. Pour preuves, on trouve l'écriture d'Eugénie de Guérin, exemple sublime pour Barbey d'Aurevilly de "la sophistication de la simplicité" (180) et le récit de la pure et désincarnée Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam de Huysmans, exemple admirable de perfection mystique. Fairfield University (CT) Marie-Agnès Sourieau Zaretsky, Robert. A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-674-72476-1. Pp. 240. $23. This book follows up on Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (FR 84.5). Strongly bound to its biographical context, the 2010 volume focused on the historical markers of four watershed years—1939, 1945, 1952, and 1956. Feeling that the constraints of the biographical and historical approach had, in his own words "slighted certain intellectual or moral themes" (10), Zaretsky devotes the five chapters of A Life Worth Living to preoccupations central to Camus's philosophy and to the complex evolution of his public persona. Still paying close attention to biography, Zaretsky's second volume deals at the same time, and in complementary fashion, with the themes of absurdity, silence, measure, fidelity, and revolt. The book's initial chapter maps out the genealogy of the absurd, both an individual, existential experience and then a philosophy, from its earliest appearance in 1936 in the Notebooks to the major works. It also stresses the urgency and lucidity of the intimate impressions and literary observations that comprise The Myth of Sisyphus, the essay where Camus decided to "leave behind philosophy's traditional vocabulary and techniques" (13). The unfinished novel Le premier homme and the short story "Les Muets," from L'exil et le royaume provide persuasive literary material for the study of silence and absence, whose reign A Life Worth Living also identifies, within an array of intellectual traditions that run from Max Picard to Louis Guilloux,Vercors, and Friedrich Nietzsche, with the primordial emergence of the logos. As he surveys the persistence and depth of the theme—in the guise of maternal silence, cosmic silence, Promethean silence, or again pragmatic silence—Zaretsky notes the ethical discordance that at times emerges out of the problematic juxtaposition of Camus's sublime metaphysical stance with the cruelty of institutionalized injustice and exploitation inherent in the colonial condition. Tracing Camus's warnings against the repetition of historical violence and his advocacy of measure and moderation, his "plea for limits" to the lessons of 234 FRENCH REVIEW 89.3 Reviews 235 Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy as well as the influence of Simone Weil's thought on the subject, Zaretsky examines Camus's cognate advocacy of "fidelity," taken to signify balanced, lucid distinction between such extreme ideological possibilities as sacrifice and mysticism, energy and violence, strength and cruelty, or truth and error. He does so by establishing parallels with Montaigne's thought and through reexamining the arguments of key documents among which Camus's famous"Letters to a German Friend."Locating its analysis in a rich and multifarious context of intellectual traditions and cultural positions, Zaretsky's study demonstrates with singular lucidity and critical balance the centrality of Camus's voice as a philosopher and moralist. From that perspective, it proves a rich and thoughtful addition to the plethora of volumes that have nurtured, on both sides of the Mediterranean, as the tragic Algerian civil war of the nineties unfolded, a significant reassessment of Albert Camus's work. Rice University (TX) Bernard Arésu Society and Culture edited by Zakaria Fatih Aitel, Fazia. We Are Imazighen: The Development of Algerian...