Above all, she loved being loved, and he had flooded her with attentions.

experienced in his personal life the conflict between the commitments to family and others and the commitment to art, which takes time and above all solitude.

Yet in these stories, reconciliation between the individual and the community, longing and belonging, speech and silence can only be imperfectly, ruefully imagined but not realized.

He contracted tuberculosis,

She was weeping uncontrollably, unable to restrain herself. “It’s nothing, darling,” she said, “it’s nothing.”

He went to France in 1940 with the manuscript of The Stranger half finished, and it was published to much acclaim in 1942, under the German occupation. He was thirty-one years old.

Down there, farther south, at the place where sky and earth met in a pure line, down there—suddenly it seemed to her that something was waiting that she had not known until today and yet had always longed for.