Albert Camus: A Life [Paperback]

Olivier Todd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 2000

In this vibrant, engaging biography of Albert Camus, the internationally acclaimed author of The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, French writer and journalist Olivier Todd has richly tapped resources never before available—personal correspondence, notebooks, public records, as well as exclusive interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, mentors, and lovers. What emerges is the study of a man caught in conflicts between family loyalties and his own passionate nature, between the call to political action and devotion to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten poor whites. Exploring Camus's impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, his underground activities during the Occupation in Paris, the intrigues of the French literati who embraced him after the publication of his first novel, L'Etranger, Todd uncovers the solitary private man behind the mask of his celebrity. He shows us a writer isolated by his own success, crippled by the charms of women he could not resist, debilitated by the tuberculosis that did not kill him. The auto accident that did adds only to the ironies in the life of this international giant of twentieth-century literature.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Olivier Todd's biography of Albert Camus matches its subject's depth by portraying the man as well as the moralist. Born in Algeria and raised in poverty by an illiterate mother, Camus never forgot where he came from. He made his name in Nazi-occupied Paris--publicly as the author of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, covertly as a member of the Resistance and editor of its newspaper, Combat--but he longed for the North African sun of his youth. During the years of crisis when Algeria struggled to break free from France, Camus alienated both colonialists and revolutionaries by supporting full equality for Arabs but denouncing terrorism. "I believe in justice," he told an Algerian heckler at a 1957 meeting he addressed in Stockholm after winning the Nobel Prize. "But I will defend my mother before justice." It is this preference for the concrete over the abstract that makes Camus such an appealing thinker. Todd's biography, which offers the most fully human depiction yet, is equally engaging. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

There are very few biographies as meticulously researched as this one by journalist and author Todd (Cruel April, LJ 8/90). In some cases, the research leads to stretches of very tedious reading, but the book's smooth narrative flow mostly prevents that and makes for a rich description of Camus's life in colonial Algiers, wartime Paris, and his relationship with his immediate family, wives, and lovers. Todd's use of personal correspondence, interviews with family members, and previously unused public records reveals a complex man who was a philosopher, novelist, literary editor, and journalist slowly dying of tuberculosis and at odds with fellow French intellectuals over his political beliefs. Set against the historical background of French North Africa, Occupied France, and the postwar Paris literary scene, Camus vividly comes to life almost 40 years after his tragic death in an automobile accident. Recommended for specific collections.
-?David Lee Poremba, Detroit P.L.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (March 9, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786707399
• ISBN-13: 978-0786707393
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #158,450 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( C ) > Camus, Albert
  • #75 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Philosophers

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Camus from Soup to Nuts, June 26, 1998

By 

Michael Gutierrez-May ([e-mail]) (Boston, Mass.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Albert Camus: A Life (Hardcover)

Olivier Todd has compiled an excellent, thorough and captivating account of the life of Albert Camus. I was particularly impressed with this book's detail and accounting of Camus' s life in Algeria before moving to France. If there is any criticism I might have, it is that there is not enough detail about his last years. For a book that is filled with interviews, details and anecdotes from those who knew Camus, wanting even more information is a bit of a complement. I always suspected that Camus's personal life was a complicated one and this book confirmed that. I read it over a ten day period and didn't really want it to end. Wonderful job!

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Terrible abridgement, September 1, 2008

By 

A. J. Sutter (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Albert Camus: A Life (Paperback)

As other reviewers have noted, this is an abridgement of the French version. And it is a bad one. Contrary to one of the other reviewers, though, I don't think the fault is with the French original.

For one thing, the abridgement makes Camus so boring and unsymapthetic for the first 1/3 of the book, that it's tempting to put the book down. This section is where the translator and his editors threw away the most material: the 1/3 mark in the translation is more like the 1/2-way point in the French original. The result is a forced march of events and girlfriends, without much description of local character or humanizing incident.

Unfortunately even the part of the book dealing with the adult Camus is stripped of a lot of meaningful material. For example, some amusing anecdotes about the local residents were edited out of Chapter 25, which describes Camus's wartime stay in a rural area of France.

Moreover, the translation itself has some weird quirks. One is the persistent reference to C.'s notebooks as "Carnets", presented as if this were a book title. Notebooks of French writers should become capital-C and italicized "Carnets" only when they're edited and published. If you're talking about what an unknown (in fact, unpublished) writer wrote in his notebooks, then you should say "notebooks" or, as Todd does in the French original, "carnets" without italics. Yet translator Ivry uses italicized "Carnets" throughout.

Another irritation is that sometimes it would have been better to leave some stuff in French and hang a footnote. E.g., in Chapter 25, the biographer talks about Camus's friendship with another French writer, Francis Ponge. Around the same time Camus's first literary works were being published, Ponge published his famous collection of prose poems, "Le parti pris des choses". Within the chapter, Ivry mentions this title in French, without translation. The chapter title is the puzzling "Men's Prejudices." Yet in Todd's original, the chapter title is "Le parti pris des hommes" -- a clear reference to Ponge's book. Ivry should have provided a translation of the book title, or else left the chapter title in French. To do as he did entirely obscures Olivier Todd's light and witty touch. (Another mystifying and humorless choice is that the original title of Ch. 25, "Rutabagas et résistances," is translated simply as "Resistances.")

If you just want a quick resume of the facts of Camus's life, should you make a commitment to this 400-page biography that may not warm you up to its subject? If you want to really dig into his life, should you read this book that skips everything that the translator (or his publisher) believed is "not of sufficient interest to the American general reader," as Ivry says in his preface? Personally, I'm interested in Camus only just enough to read one biography of him, once. Discovering the huge gap in quality between this translation and the gigantic original after I was already halfway through the English version was frustrating.

It's also sad to reflect that Ivry and his editors probably belong to that segment of US society who are most sincerely interested in literature. That they believed the average reader who's already interested enough to read 400 pages about Camus wouldn't have read 600+ pages about him, or appreciated some footnotes at the end of the book (all of the original's footnotes are omitted), represents either condescension, bad market sense or tremendously bad taste. To say nothing of the fact that by often throwing out more humanizing and light-hearted material, they're reinforcing many English speakers' false caricature of Camus, often formed after reading "The Stranger" in college, as an alienated and depressed "existentialist" guy who couldn't enjoy life.

Not all publishers make such bad choices. Oxford U Press recently published the 4th volume of a biography of Gustav Mahler, which also happens to be a translation from the French; just that volume alone comes to almost 1,800 pages in English. It would have been a much more modest project for Knopf to have published an unabridged translation of Todd's bestseller -- and much more respectful to both author and readers.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Read the French Edition of this book., May 25, 2003

By 

T. Baughman "thmsbaughman" (Massillon, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Albert Camus: A Life (Hardcover)

The only real problem I have with this book was that the American edition has been abridged. Over 150 pages have been cut. As a result much of the portrait of Camus as a philosopher has been deleted. So I would recomend reading the French edition if at all possible