People who win a Nobel Prize may not be humble about it.
One writer, Albert Camus, was. He was at the time one of the youngest person ever at age 44 to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His novels, The Stranger (L’étranger) and The Plague (La peste) and essays like The Myth of Sisyphus, translated into a multitude of languages, had made a wide impact around the world. They still do.
Camus was the French Hemingway. Although the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was the main theoretician of existentialism (and he wrote a famous play, No Exit—Huis clos—and a novel, Nausea), Camus described existence as absurd, and human life as a doomed struggle for meaning. Like Hemingway, he strung together sentences in as flat an affect as possible.
L’étranger opens:
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J’ai reçu un télégramme de l’asile : « Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. » Cela ne veut rien dire. C’était peut-être hier.
[Today mama died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the nursing home: “Mother deceased. Burial tomorrow. Kind regards.” It doesn’t mean anything. It was yesterday perhaps.]
Compare with the opening of A Farewell to Arms:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in…
