Where Is the Reunion?

Your review of Camus’ “American Journals” should--and could--have pointed out that the writer grew up poor in Algeria, and thus had more feeling for Brazil, a Third World country, than for the United States. Besides, he knew very little English. To my knowledge, Camus never even mentions the United States in his fiction, while Brazil figures in one of his most mystical, quasireligious short stories, “The Growing Stone” (“La pierre qui pousse”), which is contained in the collection “Exile and the Kingdom,” published 10 years after Camus’ trip to South America.

To refer to this writer’s preoccupation with death as “morbid” is to ignore the repeated bouts of tuberculosis and to forget that Camus’ father died in World War I, when his son was barely a year old.

PAUL A. MANKIN

Culver City