Camus grew up in poverty; his mother was illiterate. As Catherine Camus later explained to me: "Most French writers at that time had access to culture, to books, from an early age. This wasn't the case for my father. He had to find these things out for himself."
Much like downtown Havana, Belcourt's cast-iron balconies, crumbling courtyards and impressive colonial façades, seem to lend themselves to elegant decay. Luchino Visconti's 1967 film adaptation of L'Etranger was shot here, and as I sit in Café Tamgout, next to Camus' old home, local resident Nouredine recalled the day the film crews came to town.
"I remember when Visconti came," he says, throwing back a super-strength espresso.
"I was about 14 when they released it. The whole street was so excited. My father spoke to Anna Karina, but I was too shy."
Nouredine introduces me to his neighbour, Yahia, who doesn't seem quite as enthusiastic about Belcourt's famous former resident.
"Albert Ca-moose? He wasn't Algerian. He was European."
In fact, Camus was neither Algerian nor European. Like Meursault, he was a pied-noir: a French-speaking native, whose great-grandparents had emigrated from Europe under the French repatriation scheme.
Throughout his life, Camus found it difficult to imagine Algeria as completely independent from France. As a result, his work has been widely dismissed by post-colonial governments — and by many modern Algerians.
In Algiers, plaques and statues commemorating Camus — the first African Nobel laureate — are conspicuous by their absence.
Walking up the hill, we arrive at Camus' old primary school, Ecole Communale at 44, Rue Darwin. It was here that his teacher, Louis Germain, first spotted the boy's talent for writing and eventually helped him obtain a secondary school scholarship. A group of soldiers in mirrored sunglasses linger on the corner by the school gates.
Later that evening, we sit down for a plate of couscous at Brasserie des Facultés opposite the university campus. Camus came here to drink wine, talk politics and admire the local women.
No doubt he would have been disappointed had he lived to see the place now; these days, there are no outside tables, and the all-male clientele prefers coffee to whisky.
We head to nearby Bar Tono on Rue Claude Debussy. Knocking on an old wooden door, we are ushered quickly inside a tiny, smoke-filled den where we are immediately sucked into a debate about political corruption.
"Well, bad politicians exist everywhere," laughed one patron, "just look at your Tony Blair!"
No one seems sure whether Camus had actually come to Bar Tono; but it's certainly possible — it's been operating as a bar since the 1940s.
The next morning, we drive along the winding coastal road known as La Corniche, following Meursault's bus route to the city's northern beaches.
At the dusty seaside village of Deux Chameaux (Two Camels) I spot a man sunning himself on a rock in the glittering water, just as Meursault and his girlfriend, Marie, did in the opening chapters of L'Etranger. Perhaps this was the beach he had in mind when he wrote those scenes.
We leave the coastal road and veer onto the motorway. Speeding past craggy bays and leathery-looking mountain ranges, we eventually arrive at Tipasa, a Phoenician port and one of Camus' favourite picnic spots as a teenager.
The first-century Roman ruins dotted along this ragged stretch of coastline are impossibly beautiful: Camus wrote about them in his 1952 essay, Return to Tipasa: "Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus's motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches ... the evening's slight anxiety in a 16-year-old heart."
I was 16 when I first read L'Etranger, the same year I first heard Killing An Arab, The Cure's homage to the book.
A scarlet sun hovers over the Mediterranean as we wind our way back to Algiers and I can hear the lyrics in my head, "I'm alive... I'm dead... I'm the stranger..."
- INDEPENDENT
