The First Man [Hardcover]

Albert Camus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 30, 1998

In The First Man Albert 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. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellspring of Camus' aesthetic powers and moral vision.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Among the wreckage of Camus's fatal car crash in 1960 was a 144-page handwritten manuscript, a first draft of a projected epic, the Nobel Prize winner's final novel. Suppressed by his family for decades in order to avoid criticism from the Left, the manuscript, transcribed by Camus' daughter, was finally published last year in France, where it became a bestseller. Now the narrative, carefully annotated, has reached our shores, allowing admirers of Camus and of fine literature in general to delve into its complex, strongly autobiographical pages. Jacques Cormery, 40, returns to his native Algeria to learn about his father, who died at the Battle of the Marne when Jacques was one. In Africa, Jacques relives his childhood growing up in a house dominated by a gentle and illiterate mother and an abusive and illiterate grandmother. His only father figures are a "half-mute" uncle and a grade-school teacher who manages to get the boy a scholarship to a private high school. Meanwhile, the simmering racial and political conflict between Arabs and Frenchmen provides a compelling subtext that threatens to come to the fore at any moment. The autobiographical nature of the material is betrayed by Camus's occasional use of real-life names for the characters; for instance, as when he calls Jacques's mother the "Widow Camus." The profuse footnotes can make the reading slow going, but the novel is a vital example of the writer's craft, its pages filled with alluring passages depicting an exotic world so removed it feels like part of another century. Camus, who customarily revised his fiction up to a half dozen times, no doubt would have changed much, and perhaps the final version would have stressed the bitter class animus already in evidence ("Remembrance of things past is just for the rich"). It's likely that no amount of reworking, however, would have disguised the novel's most compelling aspect: the warmth and humanity of its author's spirit. BOMC and QPB selections
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

YA?This autobiographical novel was found in the car wreckage that killed the author 34 years ago. Through it, today's teens are given a glimpse of Camus's Algerian childhood. In the story, the protagonist, Jacques Cormery, lives in a variety of concurrent worlds. His much-loved, deaf-mute mother and illiterate, tyrannical grandmother provide him with a secure, though poverty-stricken family life. The sea and countryside provide him with a rich, sensuous play life while the lycee challenges him intellectually. Jacques's thoughts and adventures are enriched by the vividly drawn settings?the oppressive gray heat of summer, the feel of the sea and sun, the vision of crowded bodies on the trolley. YAs will find the story accessible and may be surprised at the universality of emotions expressed. Readers seeking a quiet guide through the deepest reaches of another spirit will gain further understanding of the human condition.?Barbara Hawkins, Oakton High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Random House Value Publishing (June 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517328615
• ISBN-13: 978-0517328613
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,930,215 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a stranger to himself, September 18, 2001

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The First Man (Paperback)

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.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars incomplete, but great work, June 7, 2005

By 

PuppyTalk "BlackMutt" (NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The First Man (Paperback)

It is reallly not fair to rate a work that is not complete. As an artist, I know how horrifying it is to show unfinished works to anybody. It really is a violation. However, whether this is Camus's first draft or 2nd draft, the evidence is everywhere what kind of great book it would have been had he had a chance to edit it, re-structure and re-write it. It was a great learning experience for me to study what a potential masterpiece looks like in the early stage of its creation.

In this draft, it seems that he was just writing down everything that had come to his mind, the things that he remembered and thought could be part of the story. It's not edited or organized well, so there are some inconsistency, unfinished sentences, and confusions. The plot is not clear, you don't know where the story is going, and the structure is not solid. There are some parts that can be eliminated as well.

But the writing itself is still very strong and beautiful, and there is a lot of wisdom in it. I especially enjoyed the chapter "the school." In this chapter he talks about the school life of the protagonist and how the teacher M. Bernard taught the children with love and discipline, and how the children loved and adored him, despite the corporal punishment they received from him for misbehaving. It's the kind of teacher-student relationship you rarely see in today's society. Each episode is vivid, detailed, heart-warming, full of wisdom and love, and beautifully written.

At the end of the book, after the story ceases, there is a section called "Interleaves." It's a collection of notes and memos of Camus, bits and pieces of scenes or dialogues, thoughts and ideas, which didn't have a chance to take parts of the book. Obviously Camus was planning to use them. They suggest that had he lived to finish the work, it would have been a totally different story, or that the story would have developed and ended much differently.

While it is disrespectful to read an incompleted work, it would have been a great loss if I didn't read it.

Thus I shall give him bright shining 5 stars, and thank him for having written this story.

35 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars his best, tragically unfinished, November 18, 2000

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The First Man (Paperback)

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+