Books: Six -from Camus

EXILE AND THE KINGDOM (213 pp.) —Albert Camus—Knopf ($3.50).

Nobel Prizewinner Albert Camus is a writer without small talk. His themes—life, love, death, man, God, time—are large and universal. He returns to them in this collection of six short stories, but the net effect—after his brilliant novel The Fall—is oddly anticlimactic. The trouble seems to lie in the triumph of symbol over substance. He offers a series of intellectual puzzlers in which the clues are elusive, though the humanistic passion that runs through them is strong and clear, reflecting Camus' vision of art as a moral inquiry into man's fate.

The lead-off story,...