fr
The King’s Gaze
The King’s Gaze, published in 1954 by Plon, is the second novel of Camara Laye. This time, no autobiography: an allegorical and initiatory novel whose hero is a fallen white man, rejected by his own society, who ventures into the African bush to access the wisdom of a distant king. The text sometimes resembles a nightmare — one feels the influence of Kafka and Amos Tutuola.
Some critics consider it Laye’s major work, the most ambitious and mystical of his catalogue. The main character, Clarence, wanders through a visionary Africa where modern technology coexists with ancestral traditions, on an initiatory journey through dreamlike landscapes.
The English edition The Radiance of the King, translated by James Kirkup, was reissued in 2001 by New York Review Books.