There may be a mystery hiding behind Albert Camus’ death. Was it the Kgb to cause the car accident costing him his life? And why? On the occasion of the centenary of the French writer’s birth, this book investigates in the cracks of the official reconstruction, looking for
hard to find truth, recalling the bitter atmosphere of an era that deeply marked European culture.
It’s January 1960 when a car swerves on a completely straight road and crashes against a tree, a hundreds kilometers from Paris, where Albert Camus was going with his publisher and friend Michel Gallimard, who was driving the vehicle. They both die.
More than forty years later, a note emerges from the diaries of Jan Zábrana, a Czech translator and poet, throwing a new light on an event at the time archived as an accident. On Camus’ death lies the long shadow of Kgb, sabotaging the car according to Šepilov’s orders, the soviet foreign minister, because Camus fought against the Ussr’s intervention in Hungary in 1956, and he had personally attacked the powerful Russian politician in several newspaper articles and public speeches. Not considering his support to Boris Pasternak’s candidature for the Nobel prize, although the Russian writer was unpopular and unpleasant in his country.
After a hundred years from Camus’ birth, this book reopens the mystery of his death, through suspicions and evidences, looking for a possible answer.
Giovanni Catelli is a writer and poet, expert in Eastern Europe culture. Some of his short stories have been published in many newspapers and magazines, such as Corriere della Sera, Nouvelle Revue Française, Nazione Indiana, L’Indice dei Libri. He published the books In fondo alla notte (1992), Partenze (1994), Geografie (1998), Lontananze (2003) and Treni (2008). Geografie, with a preface by Franco Loi, has been translated in Czech, Russian and Ukrainian.
