| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780679768166 | | Publisher: Vintage Books | | Publish Date: 8/1/1996 | | Buy.com Sku: 30119205 | | Item#: R25TLC | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5L x 0.75T |
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| | | | Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. Published thirty-five years after its discovery amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed Camus, The First Man is the brilliant consummation of the life and work of one of the 20th century's greatest novelists. Translated from the French by David Hapgood.
"The First Man is perhaps the most honest book Camus ever wrote, and the most sensual...Camus is...writing at the depth of his powers...It is a work of genius."--The New Yorker
"Fascinating...The First Man helps put all of Camus's work into a clearer perspective and brings into relief what separates him from the more militant literary personalities of his day...Camus's voice has never been more personal."--New York Times Book Review
Annotation:
The manuscript to this unfinished novel was found in the wreckage of the car in which Camus perished. It was withheld from publication at the time of Camus' death, as it was believed that it would be savaged by his detractors. THE FIRST MAN is the first volume of Camus's projected epic, WAR AND PEACE, and covers the years of his childhood in Algeria. He tells of growing up fatherless with a deaf-mute mother and an illiterate, tyrannical grandmother; of poverty transcended by escapes to the beach, to the streets and docks, and joyous hunting expeditions with his uncle. His love for his silent mother is deeply rooted, but deeper still is the void left behind by his father's absence. With the miraculous intervention of a wise schoolteacher, the young boy discovers learning and gains a sense of purpose, which he still must reconcile with his family's illiterate, working-class origins.
| PraiseKirkus
"It's hard to believe any reader could have been blind to the work's distinctive merits....the very incompleteness of the work validates its power....All honor to Catherine Camus for offering us this invaluable glimpse into the life and art of a writer who may have been greater than we knew then or can know even now." 07/15/1995New York Times Book Review
"The book is a fascinating autobiographical novel, told in the third person (heightening the semblance of fiction), and represents a search for the author's self as well as a kind of testament. The novel helps put all of Camus' work into a clearer perspective and brings into relief what separates him form the more militant literary personalities of his day, like Malraux and Sartre....His richest perceptions are sensuous and poetic." - Victor Brombert 08/27/1995 New York Times
"The reader of 'The First Man' will be inclined to echo the sentiments of Camus's biographer Patrick MacCarthy, who has argued (with only a little hyperbole) that the author's 'life and writing were shaped by a few images of his childhood--the Mediterranean, the sudden silence of the Algiers evening and, above all, his mother.'...Serves as a kind of magical Rosetta stone to Camus's entire career, illuminating both his life and his work with stunning candor and passion." - Michiko Kakutani 08/25/1995 Newsweek
"Personal but never sentimental, this is a bittersweet story about finding one's place in the world without betraying one's origins. Had he lived, this famously private author would probably have chosen to reveal less about himself....The ironic bright spot in the otherwise tragic circumstance of his death is that he never got that chance." - Malcolm Jones Jr. 09/04/1995 Montreal Gazette
"...surely Catherine Camus did her father a great service to offer this last testament in its raw form....As tightly written as a thriller, it is a classic of Existentialism..." - Marianne Ackerman 09/12/1995 |
| Author Bio| Albert Camus | | Albert Camus was the younger of two brothers. His mother was an illiterate charwoman, his father an itinerant agricultural worker who was killed in World War I. In 1923, Camus won a scholarship to the lyc?e in Algiers, where he studied from 1924 to 1932 and began to suffer from the incipient tuberculosis that was to plague him all his life. Already a writer of some renown in Algeria, Camus moved to Paris in 1938, where he worked in theater and publishing and as a journalist for various newspapers. In 1939 he was divorced from his first wife, Simone Hi?, who was a morphine addict. He married Francine Faur? in 1940 and published his first novel, THE STRANGER, in 1946. An existentialist who became known as "the conscience of his nation," Camus set out to capture the absurdity of life and the innate meaninglessness of the world. He was heavily influenced by the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche and was closely linked to fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s, but he broke with him over Sartre's support of Stalinist politics. Camus was member of the French resistance during World War II. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957 and died in an automobile accident near Sens, France in 1960. |
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