Following the Noble Prize awarded to Albert Camus in 1957, Algerian author Kateb Yacine, adamantly proclaimed that “il faut que les Français comprennent que la littérature algérienne, ce n’est pas Camus, et l’Algérie n’est pas française” (The French need to understand that Algerian literature isn’t Camus and Algeria isn’t French). Camus’s conflicted place, buried in the psyche of the Algerian nation, has haunted Algerian authors and intellectuals of French expression for decades since independence. What to do with Camus? Was he a traitor? A political fighter seeking in his eyes a more equitable, “federalized” Algeria? Should he be discounted and effaced from the remembrance of things past in Algeria because he represents the very fragmented identity the FLN rebels and, later, nascent government tried to solidify in 1962? These questions and others are explored in Hamid Grine’s Camus dans le Narguilé (2011). Remembering Camus and discussing his disputed place in the annuals of Algerian history are at the core of this novel written in Algeria’s post “années noires” of the new millennium. Grine’s novel proposes that we think about whether Camus should be remember within a reflective or restorative nostaligic framework. Should the Algerian-French writer be buried in the ruins of the colonial past, left to be reflected upon as part of that past? Or, should he be restored in the way that he really was: conflicted and deeply grieved by what he viewed as the failure of Algeria to engage with its exceptionnalisme, rooted in its multiculturalism and multilingual make-up. This exceptionalism was for Camus the driving force behind a particular pensée du midi (Mediteranean way of thinking) he believed was held dear by authors and intellectuals living primarily in Algiers in the late 1950s. Grine, a contemporary resistance writer, writes from Algeria. His mission is to scrutinize Camus’s conflicted place in Algerian memory in order to exploit and expose topical and often delicate issues that have plagued the sociopolitical realms of contemporary Algeria since the French left in 1962. Camus’s disputed place in Algeria becomes a metaphor for the murky choices made by Algerian authorities, the FLN, and the way history has been documented by Algerian keepers of postcolonial history since 1962.