Status Updates From Koninkrijk en ballingschap

"The pale black sky still seemed liquid. In its dark, transparent water, low on the horizon, stars were beginning to fare. They flickered out almost at once, falling one by one into the river, as if the sky were spilling is last lights, drop by drop."

In The Guest, our protagonist Daru struggles between his fondness for his Arab prisoner and his duty to his home country in Algeria. Daru frees the prisoner, only to watch the Arab turn himself in. Thus, Daru is exiled by the French, and by the Arabs.

This is story is literally a depiction of Camus' life: born in Algeria, affectionate towards Arabs, who took neither one side nor the other and ended up doubly exiled.

"Inside this desert, no one, neither he nor his guest, mattered." Each story in this collection echoes the absurdism that Camus developed first in The Stranger and formalized in The Myth of Sisyphus: the utter lack of meaning in life; an uncaring universe that will move on infinitely without you.

While many do not appreciate the Hemingwayesque short sentences ("It was very hot."), I appreciate them. That is not to say that I do not also enjoy the never-ending sentences of Kafka.

The stories are clearly autobiographical in metaphor. Each one deals in elements of Camus' life: his affection towards Arabs held in dissonance with his devotion to his home country, his silence during the war between them, and his feeling of exile from both camps.

Camus's once-forgotten collection of philosophical short stories reminds one of Borge's metaphysical stories of the same sort.