The First Man

Rating:
Summary: a stranger to himself
Review: Albert Camus. I have always liked his books, especially The Plague. My favorite part of that book was not necessarily the conversations between the characters but the moments of solitude where the sensual beauty of the world is silently looked upon. Reading The First Man I found a book by Camus that I prefer to his novels and stories because in this unfinished autobiography you get the feeling you are listening to the loneliest man on earth. It is sad, but it is heartwarming, this is Camus alone and what is important to Camus stands out like it does nowhere else. In other words this is Camus outside the context we normally encounter him in which is the turbulent intellectual debates in France of the 40's and 50's. Camus never believed in the politics of the French left in regards to the Arab countries and the future course of leadership for those nations which were his home from a very early age and where this autobiographical novel takes place. Camus believed in an alliance of European and Arab peoples that would rule together. You cannot help but think Camus was perhaps trying to come to terms with his own identity which was a combination of both places, and perhaps an uneasy combination. In some ways he reminds me of T.E. Lawrence in that his ultimate vision was always at odds with almost everyone elses. Both were ultimately very lonely figures. This book concentrates on the childhood years but since we all know what the future held for Camus it is all the more moving. And that feeling for nature which required no identity and had none of its own it seems was there from the beginning.

Rating:
Summary: Insight into the Real Life of Camus
Review: Camus always wrote about things based on his life. Because this is an unfinished work, the story is almost a completely accurate account of Camus's early childhood. He did not really have any time to edit and "mask" himself. Like the character in the book, his father died at the Battle of Marne, his mother was a partially deaf maid, and he was mostly raised by his grandmother. The hardships that Camus faced are all described in his book. If you are looking for Camus's typical thrilling plot, look elsewhere. If you are true Camus fanatic eager to learn about the extremely humble beginnings of one of the most modern philosophical geniuses, look no further.

Rating:
Summary: Very Interesting
Review: Camus' final book, found in the wreckage the day his life was taken. "The First Man" is incomplete and lacking Camus polishing, which would have made the novel more discreet.
"The First Man" is the tale of Jacques Cormory. His life, his struggles, his personal revelations, and his relationships are all Albert Camus'. "The First Man" is a biographical novel. This is an actual account (name changes?) of Camus' experiences, it is really nothing like any of his other works, but it's not lacking in words of wisdom, or the why(?) and how(?) of things.

Rating:
Summary: POPSPICK PLUS
Review: Don't miss this book. For teachers the last two chapters of this book are worth the price of the book. It leaves a lasting impression.

Rating:
Summary: Albert Camus' The First Man - we have no right to read this
Review: I was going to read this book. I bought it for a graduate class I'm taking in the English department at the university where I am attaining my Master's. Then I looked into the history a bit and decided that to read this book would be to engage in ideological rape. Albert Camus did not give his CONSENT to publish this book in this version. Period. Posthumous publishing of a dead author's UNCOMPLETED work or works is immoral and unethical. I don't need to quench my voyeuristic thirst by reading something the author never intended me to read. Some might argue otherwise, but I just don't see how peeking at your sibling's diary is EVER justified. It is someone else's private property, we don't have a right to read it without their permission.

Sincerely,

Sean Hooks

Rating:
Summary: his best, tragically unfinished
Review: It is better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass graves. -Albert Camus

This unfinished autobiographical novel comes to us nearly forty years after Camus died in a car crash, because, as his daughter explains in her introduction, his wife and friends were afraid to publish it at the time of his death. They feared that it would make an easy target for the increasingly numerous critics of Camus, who had gone from being an icon of the left, winning the Nobel Prize in 1957, to being a pariah, because of his principled stand on two issues: first, he refused to turn a blind eye to the Gulag and denounced the totalitarian methods of the Soviet Union; second, he refused to go along with the Algeria-for-the-Arabs climate of the times, calling instead for a sharing of power between natives and European colonists. In addition, the preoccupation with morality in his writings struck the intellectuals of his day as antiquated and quaint. Publishing a fragmentary work would have invited attacks on his already sliding reputation by a literary class which had turned on him for these myriad political reasons.

The novel, which was actually found in the wreckage of his car, would indeed have been greeted with hoots and catcalls by the Left. It is the most sentimental and personal of all his works. The story of Jacques Cormery's return to Algeria and his reflections on his coming of age is filled with inchoate longing, for the Algeria of his youth, for the Father who died when he was just a child, for the love of a beautiful but deaf and distant Mother and for a moral code by which to live. It brilliantly evokes a distinct place and time and the happy memories of a difficult childhood. There are numerous vignettes that earn a place in memory--from the disappointment of winning a schoolyard brawl "vanquishing a man is as bitter as being vanquished", to the embarrassment of reading movie subtitles aloud to his illiterate grandmother. Taken on its own terms, the novel is a classic tale of youth and moral development. And in terms of our understanding of the mature Camus, it goes a long way to explaining the sense of alienation which pervades all of his other writings.

His failure to toe the politically correct line is most evident in his treatment of the incipient Arab uprising. Here is what a French farmer tells his employees after he plows under his own farm:

The Arab workers were waiting for him in the yard..."Boss, what are we going to do?"

If I were in your shoes, the old man said, "I'd go join the guerillas. They're going to win. There're no men left in France."

Not exactly a sentiment that's designed to ingratiate the author with either of the fanatic Wings of French politics, Left nor Right.

But ultimately, the book is most important for the way in which it illuminates the author's life long attempt to craft a moral structure that will obtain despite his belief that life is finite, directionless and fundamentally pointless. The course of the Century has seen morality reduced to a bourgeois, conservative concern. An author, theoretically of the Left, who was so concerned with morality, was, and would still be today, a complete anachronism. The fact that sentiments like the epigraph above (It is better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass graves.) were sufficient to earn him the enmity of the intellectual elites of his day, is indicative of the degree to which the Left has abandoned any pretense of moral reasoning, in favor of an orientation towards politically desirable results, regardless of the means used to arrive at those ends.

The Myth of Sisyphus is the central metaphor of existentialism in the writings of Camus (see Orrin's review). Sisyphus was one of the Titans and, for his rebellion against the Gods, he was sentenced to roll an enormous boulder up a hill. Every day the boulder would roll back to the bottom and he would have to start over again. Camus used this senseless, unproductive task to symbolize all of human existence. Man is trapped in a life which never achieves anything, has no meaning beyond mere existence and leaves no aftereffects upon his death.

It is ironic then that this greatest philosopher of existentialism, a life denying theory which inevitably leads to the Death Camps, should have written this beautifully life affirming work. As his daughter says in her intro, Camus would never have published such an open and honest novel, he would have masked his personal feelings. We are lucky he never got the chance, because what survives here, in a raw unfinished form, is his best work--a story which demonstrates that life is not tragic but rather that even a brutally difficult life of emotional isolation and grinding poverty can produce a great man like Albert Camus. That a life which seemingly illustrates his dictum about the harsh senseless nature of existence, should forge a man of such adamantium moral rectitude and that he, in this most revelatory work, should look back on those years with so much love and nostalgia, for me at least, puts the lie to the theory that existence consists of little more than Sisyphiphean despair and endurance.

There is nothing absurd or desperate about the life that he portrays here; his accidental honesty provides an overwhelming argument against the very philosophy he espoused. And the capacity of even his impoverished and ignorant family to forge a Camus and the enduring influence of both his writing and the example that he set by speaking important truths demonstrates that man is capable of progress, indeed is continually making progress. France, a nation with much to be ashamed of, should be especially embarrassed that the best work of its best philosopher had to await the fall of Communism before friends and family felt that his reputation could withstand the revelation of this masterpiece. But then again, the fact that it can safely be published now is another sign of progress.

GRADE: A+

Rating:
Summary: redemption at last
Review: It is, after all, about their own lives that writers write best. Here is no exception, and this book, far beyond any other recollection of childhood I have ever read, exhumes the anguish of memory. The chronicle of his past is underscored by poverty, but out of that, Camus has built an evocation of childhood that overcomes bitterness and misanthropy and finds redemption. Somehow, Camus has emerged as the completed man, the mature man, who can finally be consoled, rather than confronted, by his own past; above all, he has sketched his life as an emotional journey, and in finding solace in the destination to which he has arrived, for better or worse, he elevates those principle forces that steered his course, his mother and his childhood instructor. This is indeed, as Camus himself termed it, the novel of his maturity, and the only unfulfilling aspect of his story is that it will remain unfinished. As the story relates, however, we can always find happiness in what we have, even if it is not exactly all that we wanted.

Rating:
Summary: A Voice from One's Death
Review: That a last work should dwell on one's childhood is ironic. That an unfinished last work pulled from one's death car can be gently edited and published is fantastic.

Camus would have died a second time to keep this work from publication, but true Camus champions should find it an extraordinary insight into a proto-opus of one of the great author's of the 20th century.

Others will find it unfathomable and confusing, especially if they are unable to differntiate finished work from work-in-progress.

Rating:
Summary: A compelling story
Review: This book was written about a man named Jacques Cormery, someone who lived a life a lot like Camus'. My only regret is that Camus did not live long enough to revise it and polish it up, because if you read this book, some parts are a bit disconnected. There were paragraphs he wanted omitted, but were included anyway by the editor. There were also quite a few illegible words marked throughout the book. Anyhow, this book would be best read by people who thought they had rough childhoods. After reading this book, I no longer frown on the days I was disciplined because it just wasn't nearly as bad! You may also appreciate what you have, including certain family members, since both Camus and Cormery both lost their fathers at an early age. Overall, it's a great insight into someone's life, including a lot of personal details, which I enjoyed reading.

Rating:
Summary: A Rough Gem
Review: This is the novel Camus was working on when he died. It is unfinished and intensely personal . That the work is autobiographical is evident from the inconsistent naming of characters; in one place a characters name is fictious, in another from Camus' life. For example, the mother is once called "Widow Camus."

The work wasn't published following Camus' death but only much later. In some measure that was due to the fact that Camus was out of favor with the French intellectual left for his criticism of Stalin and his position on what should be done with Algeria, the land of his birth.

The recollections of his childhood are wrapped within a visit to his father's grave then to his mother. The father was killed in the first world war. It was the father's first visit to France and he died there. The father plays little role, dying when Camus was quite young. There is the story of his father attending a public execution and the effect of that on him and the child.

Extreme poverty permeats his youth. He did well in school and with the help of a teacher he dearly loved, he was able to continue with schooling. But read the story in his words. Rough as they are, they are better than mine.