The First Man

by Albert Camus

Book Overview

From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own, with the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood steeped in poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his mother.

"A work of genius." --The New Yorker

Published thirty-five years after its discovery amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed Camus,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679768165
• ISBN13: 9780679768166
• Release Date: August 1996
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

incomplete, but great work

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.

Camus's unfinished "Horatio Alger" Story

_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..."

his best, tragically unfinished

It is better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass graves. -Albert CamusThis 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, directionl

A Most Honest Camus

"~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.

Surprisingly Brilliant

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.