Customer Reviews

The First Man

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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+

_The First Man_ was published by the late author's daughter, Catherine Camus. Largely autobiographical, the manuscript was raw, uncorrected and unfinished at the time of Camus's death. In it Camus speaks of the father he never met, who was killed in combat in World War I. Camus, called "Jacques Cormery" in the novel, was raised by his strong-willed grandmother, a strict disciplinarian who would punish Jacques for wearing out his shoes playing soccer. From a poverty stricken family living in Algiers, Jacques's grandmother just did not have the money to purchase him new shoes. Jacques's war widow mother, a deaf mute, took a backseat to his grandmother in raising her son. Both women were illiterate. Jacques's Uncle Ernest, also deaf, provided a loving and strongly positive male role model for Jacques. Camus also describes the beneficent influence of a beloved male teacher who greatly encourages Jacques to succeed academically despite his family's indigence and ignorance.

According to Camus's daughter, who wrote the preface to the book, had Camus lived, as a man with a reserved nature he would have edited out much of his personal feelings that he included in the manuscript. Left untouched the published manuscript had an honesty that it may not otherwise have had. The book's unedited, frequent run-on sentences lent the book a flowing quality and a sense of immediacy and urgency. Camus also beautifully described the suffocatingly hot, sere quality of the Algiers summers. For me, _The First Man_ is a scintillating tale of a boy who triumphed despite his extreme disadvantages, who was never without "a sure confidence...(that) guaranteed that he would achieve everything he desired..."

I'm a big fan of Camus, but withheld reading this, the only book of his I had not read, because I did not like "Exile and the Kingdom" very much and thought his powers somewhat dimmed. I heard about the superlatives being heaped on the book, but I did not believe them because frankly, it's his last work, and praise would have been forthcoming even if it was not up to par. BIG SURPRISE, it's extremely effective as a novel, even unfinished, and I think it's INCREDIBLE. There are so many wonderful images in this, so many touching stories, more than once I felt like weeping- I loved it- I couldn't put it down- another great book by the master. If you haven't read it for the same reason I waited so long, stop what you're doing and pick it up- you'll get to meet Camus all over again- and you'll love him just as much.

"~Great book, I had read The Stranger and was captivated by that; The First Man seems to be more autobiographical. It seems to capture the existentialist predicament of being thrown into the world not of one's own making, having the circumstances of your life dictated by chance but still being responsible for who you are and what you become. It seems the protagonist struggles to create himself; and in that sense he is writing on a clean slate, creating the first man, so to speak. read.

Albert Camus, author of The Stranger and The Plague, died in a car wreck in 1960. His briefcase, found at the scene, contained the first draft of his most poignant and personal novel.

It's taken all this time to convince his family this thing was worth publishing, unfinished though it is. Was it worth the wait? You bet! In fact, The First Man is one of the most impressive releases in recent years because readers get the raw Camus: daring yet touching. His main character, Jacques Cormery, is suspiciously similar to the author; therefore, what we get is a first-hand account of the Algeria Camus loved so desperately.

The First Man's most poignant episodes are those concerned with Cormery's search for the father he never knew. The low-key lyricism splendidly evokes the tormented spirit of a man as he makes a pilgrimage to the center of his own heart.

I often felt as though I were drowning in the text of "The First Man"; the descriptions transport you to his childhood, the emotions are tangible, and his complete wish to express the ideal and potentiality within the ordinary come quite close to being realized.
the pace hits you when you least expect it to; one is thrown momentarily off-kilter only to discover a greater balance of meaning in the story's varied progressions. The unfinished aspects and editor's addition of sidenotes complements the intended ambiguity as it makes one realize that there is more to be said, constantly more to be read into.
The lack of editing also gives the narrative an effusive feeling, and we feel much closer to the unbarred inspiration and intense feeling of the book, as if it was coming directing from someone's head, without interuption, the logic of a chain of developing thoughts. worth the read.

i was wondering, throughout the time i was absorbing the smell, the colors, the sounds, the intimate feelings of young albert and friends were tasting and having in algiers, how did the author manage to bring it all up and spread it all in front of me, the reader, a total stranger, so that i can almost be with him there?

i cannot recall a book bringing me so suddenly and powerfully back to my own childhood. and i have never even been near the northern africa region!

If you like Camus, Algeria, existentialism, the Mediterranean, history, the Sahel, motherhood or any of the above--or even Proust--you'll be moved by THE FIRST MAN. So many questions about the origins of Arab-Western conflict, about life in North Africa, or about why we and Camus came to our world view, are richly answered here. Camus' earlier works set in Algeria, such as THE PLAGUE and THE STRANGER, are enhanced by this fragmentary revelation of his childhood reverence for "the sweet security of poverty," of simple sensual pleasures, of serving without question, and of groping, always restlessly, for one's own values