The First Man

I ordered Albert Camus’s The First Man as soon as it became available in 1995, and read it that week. I was a big fan of what I considered his fictional trilogy - The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall - and also much of his philosophy. Even though I knew it was unfinished, I was eager to read it. It was a manuscript that Camus was still working on, with marginalia for future reference. It was found in the car he crashed into a tree in 1960, when he died at the age of 47, three years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. It wasn't published in French until 1994, and in English the following year.

Editors’ notes indicate that the novel is essentially autofiction, and perhaps not something the private Camus would have ever published in its current form. His scribbled notes suggest that he intended to make this story of growing up more fictional after getting the basic story down. My hardcover edition is 288 pages, but it also includes appendices with notes on interleaves, and attached notes and sketches of what was yet to come.

What you should know is that this is not just a collection of notes, but a captivating story of Camus’s growing up. It is a warm, humane, and often touching tale, the most intimate of his writings. I think it’s excellent and highly recommend it to all Camus fans, especially. Four people play important roles in his upbringing: his quiet and illiterate mother whom he loved deeply; his demanding and harsh grandmother; a teacher who supported him throughout his life; and his father, who died in the war when Camus was just one year old. Camus grew up in poverty.

Camus beautifully highlights various vignettes such as his birth, his early and continued success in school, and his close relationship with his often silent and illiterate mother. The book also explores the omnipresence of war and offers a meditation on the violence lurking within humans. It describes what it was like to grow up in poverty, raised by a single mother and grandmother after his father's death. Camus did well in school, but his family needed him to work, so he started working in a shipyard and other places at an early age, while also getting scholarships to pay for his education. His relationship with one teacher was so close that they remained in contact for most of his adult life, providing a beautiful example of a teacher-student bond.

Perhaps, above all, this book is a kind of quiet tribute to his mother, who raised him largely in silence. There is a lot of great writing in this, what appears to be a first draft, presenting a tender portrait of the future Nobel Prize winner. I truly love it.

Although incomplete and partially restored, it remains a very beautiful book, honest in its autobiographical nature and judged as such.

Despite the fact that it was not completed and did not have the benefit of the author's editing before publication, it never loses the reader who is immersed in the story and is suddenly awakened when the book ends. Nostalgia and an ironic eye on the past are scattered throughout the work, while the pain is so strong that the book still stands as a compilation of fragments (okay, maybe I'm a bit exaggerated here).

This unfinished work has a certain charm that吸引读者 into its world. The lack of completion gives it an air of mystery and makes the reader wonder what could have been.

The author's ability to convey emotions and paint a vivid picture of the past is truly remarkable. Even in its fragmented state, the book manages to touch the reader's heart and leave a lasting impression.

Overall, this is a book that is well worth reading, despite its flaws. It offers a unique perspective on life and history, and is a testament to the power of literature.

Albert Camus' last book was read very slowly by me. Its manuscript was found among the debris of the car accident that led to his death. I read only a few pages a day and there were several days when I had no desire to read it.

It wasn't because I didn't like the story, but rather because reading it made me sad. The wild, dirty and poor landscapes of Algiers, the climate itself, the unhappiness of the adult characters in the story who just survive day by day, and even the adventures of the children and their will to learn in school and overcome all the obstacles in high school were not enough for me to have a different view from determinism. That is, most of those who are born poor in the suburbs of a colonized city in North Africa, whether they are colonizers or colonized, can expect nothing but a future of deprivations.

This unfinished book of Albert Camus, first published in 1994, more than 30 years after the author's death in 1960, is an autobiography of the writer's childhood in Algiers through the character he created, Jacques Cormery. At the request of his mother, Jacques goes to visit the grave of his father in Saint Brieuc, in the Brittany region of northern France, near the place where a battle took place during World War I, where his father was fatally wounded.

Although he didn't know his father and never felt his absence, being thus a kind of "The First Man", he ends up being perplexed when he discovers that his father died at just over twenty years old, while he is already over forty years old and becomes interested in knowing his father's life path, that of the French colonizers who are promised a better life in Algeria, a French colony, but who, upon arriving there, only find difficulties.

After the death of his father, Jacques' mother goes to live with her two sons in the house of her mother-in-law and her deaf-mute uncle in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Algiers, where the family lives in poverty. The days are all the same in the search for survival and Jacques, who loves his mother very much, sees her always tired and unhappy.

What saves him from this hopeless life are the games and plays he participates in with his friends on the streets, in the port and on the beaches of Algiers and a primary school teacher who, realizing his abilities and those of three of his friends, prepares them for the entrance exams to high school, in which three of the four are approved, as well as helps him obtain scholarships and, most difficult of all, manages to convince Jacques' grandmother, who actually exercises power in the family, to allow him to continue his studies, but does so reluctantly, as she has to give up another source of income in the family (her grandson's destiny would be to work).

Jacques, as an adult, goes to live in France and on one of his visits to Algiers, to visit the family, which occurs in the 1950s, he finds a city where fear and violence have settled due to the attacks of the Algerians who want independence and the consequent repression of the French military and police.

Jacques' mother lives only with her deaf-mute brother, as the grandmother has already died, and continues to have the same life as always: an existence without dreams, without desires and of daily routines. And that is what saddens me the most in this story: the days being all the same, as if the passage of people on earth could be easily erased, since they do not derive any well-being from their lives and all their path is easily forgotten.

Given the number of inaccuracies, author’s footnotes, and the incompleteness of the ending, one has to treat this as an unfinished novel, or a memoir with names fictionalized.

Nevertheless, the fact that the manuscript was found in the wrecked vehicle in which Camus perished, and that it was published 35 years after he died, gives it a special place in the Nobel prize-winning author’s canon.

The book covers Camus’ birth in 1913 until his graduation from school at the age of 15 in Algeria. The narrative is told by an older Camus (or Jacques, per his fictitious name) in his forties, who is visiting the former colony from France to discover who his father was. His father left the family when Camus was a year old and went to fight for France in the First World War, never to return. The bereft family of the mute mother and two sons (Jacques is the younger) go to Algiers to live with the maternal grandmother and uncle.

Life at Grandma’s is unhappy, impoverished and devoid of love. Grandma is the boss and beats Jacques for the slightest transgression. She also wants this gifted student to quit his studies and find a job to help keep the family aloft. Thanks to a benevolent teacher, the family is persuaded to delay their material gratification until young Jacques can complete his education for a higher return on their investment.

Two-thirds of the book is the older Jacques’ search for his father, whose family migrated from Alsace to Algeria during the time of the Second Republic in France in 1848. Jacques has difficulty reconciling that his father died at 29 while he is now an older man. In the process, we are treated to his minute recollections of childhood.

The complex but mellifluous sentences in this book are its main draw. Camus conjures colonial Algeria in her last days of empire extremely well. The French in Algeria are lost souls, persecuted persecutors, living in a land without forefathers or memory. When Jacques has to fill up a school admission form, he wonders what his nationality is, and settles on “French.” In Algeria, there is a distinction between the French resident and the Arab local, and there is the influence of the Spanish as well who occupy parts of Morocco next door and whose mother country and Balearic Islands sit across the water from Northwest Africa. Grandma is of Spanish heritage.

We get detailed accounts of life with Uncle Ernest, the cooper; après-school antics on the commercial drag, the rue Bab Azoun; the “sugar cane” (aka the strap) administered by the otherwise kindly teacher, M. Bernard; summer employment stints that confirm to Jacques he is not cut out for clerical work; life at the lycee, including duels between students; outings at the beach and games played between children. The eccentricity of poor people of a bygone time makes for curiosity. Jacques’ later proclivity towards sensuousness is caused by his mother’s withdrawn nature and his grandmother’s cruelty.

“Poor people’s memory is less nourished than the rich. It has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place they live in.” People struggling to survive have no time for affection.

This book made me wonder why such detailed recording of history was important to the author, and to all memoirists, for that matter. Life in colonial Algeria appears no different to life in colonial Ceylon where I grew up, a member of the European colonial remnant. We did the same things that Jacques (or Camus) did. But why is it important to record? A freezing of time? Capturing a society that has all but disappeared? A quest for immortality? I’m sure it’s a combination of all these things. For me, reading this book was a validation that being a colonial relic is as hard as it is to be part of a colonized nation, especially when the balance is restored, nationalization takes place, and the tables are turned. The quest for identity and purpose for everyone becomes fierce at these inflection points.

Book, an incomplete and unfinished writing of a story that can mostly be called a biography, or maybe a biography in which a short summary of the story has been kneaded with it!

From the first lines of the book, I said to myself that this first character of the story is none other than Camus himself. And the more I advanced, the more certain I became. The book is the story of Camus' life from childhood and when he was in Algeria. When I read Camus' notes in the book, I understood how important his mother was to him, but in this book, Camus has talked about his mother in a completely clear and bright way and has been able to convey this feeling to the reader.

The book narrates events and incidents very part by part, and this may make it a bit boring for the reader, but it should also be considered that this book is not completed and is just a series of manuscripts that after Camus' death, his daughter found and published.

With all these interpretations, with all its difficult reading, I am happy that I was able to enter Camus' life more :)

The original article seems to be missing. Please provide the article so that I can rewrite and expand it for you.

In the preface of the book, it is mentioned that the manuscripts of this book were found in his pocket after Camus' death, and 34 years later, his daughter had the book published.

This last remaining work of Camus, who was engaged in writing it before his death, is actually taken from the true story of his own life, and he believed that this book was his best work.

The book tells the life of an individual named Jacques in his childhood and at the age of forty, detailing his lifestyle, his spiritual state, and his beliefs about living in poverty in Algeria, the harmful effects and the unacceptable violence of war, and his social status.

The book is incomplete, and many parts of the manuscripts have been marked by Camus to be completed later, and references to all those parts are made in the footnotes. Some parts of the story have been well-developed, and detailed descriptions have even been considered, while some parts have quickly passed over the subject, and the consistent tone of Camus' writing is not fully captured. Of course, in the appendix of the book, some of Camus' scattered manuscripts are included, which help the reader to understand the effect that the author was trying to create.

However, overall, these inconsistencies and incompleteness of the book are not such that they would be unappealing or boring to the reader.

I went through a thousand times with myself to read a line or even several lines from the middle of the book until it was finished. Maybe one reason is that I have very little patience in this part of my life. Maybe another reason is that I have a little time left to read my paper books and I want to be able to read a lot of very good books in this period. Maybe another reason could be that...

This novel is all description; and too much description is something that can bother me a lot. The whole of this unfinished novel from the first word to the last word is dedicated to description; the description of situations, the description of places, times, weather, living conditions and social, political, economic and....

But what happened that I couldn't continue much with the rhythm of reading a line in the middle and several lines in the middle? Because the author of this novel is Albert Camus! Camus always caught me in his sentences. Exactly a little after reading the text quickly, my eyes would fall on a part of the book that would engage my mind for a while. This human being has really reached a very low understanding of the past, present and future of lives.

Death unfortunately did not give him the peace to finish this book and start the cycle of love. This incomplete text may ultimately be at the level of 3 stars; even considering that it is from the last writings of Camus who had previously written about strangers, falls and rebellions. The interesting point is that maybe if Camus had completed this work, it might not have been so descriptive; maybe on the contrary, it would have been even more descriptive. But what could be inferred from the final manuscripts of the book which were at the level of notes and outlines was that this writing was just a plan and an introduction for a much longer narrative. If Camus had not intended to review the descriptive style of the book and the volume of the novel, I think these 300 and a few pages would have become 1000 pages. These very things also make this novel strangely difficult for me. On the one hand, it is difficult, tiring and annoying, and on the other hand, it is difficult, unfamiliar and original in the style of Camus who writes short compared to others. I really wish he were alive and would write about a love that knew the solution to the little problem of life and the main way of rebellion of mankind against this little problem...