The First Man by Albert Camus (MOBI)

Description

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. Published thirty-five years after its discovery amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed Camus, The First Man is the brilliant consummation of the life and work of one of the 20th century’s greatest novelists. Translated from the French by David Hapgood.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐When he died in a tragic and unforeseen car crash in 1960, novelist and existentialist Albert Camus had a draft of this work in his briefcase. It was not published until the 1990s, but is the most autobiographical of Camus’ works. The main character, like the author, grew up impoverished in Algeria and escaped a life of the same through education. This tale, properly characterized as a coming-of-age novel, shares how the great writer and future Nobel-Prize winner understood his maturity into an adult man.The protagonist Jacques Cormery grew up not knowing his father. The father was never married to Cormery’s mother and died in battle in World War I. Jacques’ mother was partially deaf and also mute. His grandmother lived with the family, but was illiterate. So his family background was not ideal for social ascent. He attended school, and a teacher appreciated his keen mind. Through this teacher’s involvement, he won a scholarship to the lycée, the French equivalent of the gymnasium or an advanced high school.His studies at the lycée opened the world to him, both intellectually and interpersonally. Despite gaining and growing, Jacques was still a child in the eyes of his mother and grandmother. Like many Americans who are the first in their families to attend college, achieving adulthood is not an automatic process; the world of work, not study, is viewed as the threshold. Thus, he was forced to labor during a summer break. This experience not only won him money for himself and for his family, but it also won him enduring respect of the matriarchs in his life.This work is frankly not as great as The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger, or The Plague. That might be due to the fact that we have only a draft, not a finished product. The writing is good, but just not entirely polished. The value resides in its autobiographical nature and in its portrayal of pre-World-War-II Algeria through the eyes of an attentive but impoverished young lad. The reader cannot help but wonder what might have become of this text had Camus lived past 1960.Incidentally, it took 30+ years for this text to be published because Camus’ family was afraid the unpolished nature would discredit his notoriety. Fortunately, his philosophical and literary greatness has withstood the tests of time. Accordingly, Albert’s daughter Catherine felt free enough to share this tale with the world. For us, it contains the unvarnished passion of rolling sentences and cultural acuity. Fans of Camus (like myself) will enjoy gaining a deeper understanding of this great twentieth-century figure, about how he as a child transformed into a man of courage.

⭐I always wanted to read the First Man, Camus’ unfinished novel found at the site of the tragic car crash that took his life. Even though unfinished, it is worth reading for the detailed, warm, and colorful accounts of his youth in Algiers. The stories of his poor family are heartwarming and real. It is a shame this novel was unfinished and it was expected to be much longer from his notes on where he was going with it. I get the sense that the love story part, which is not captured in the existing book, was going to be aimed at symbolically dealing with the left’s criticism of Camus for desiring an Algeria where Arabic and French could peacefully lead the country together.Some of the writing in the First Man, dealing with his childhood, is some of the most emotional and heartfelt in all of Camus’ writing. I highly recommend reading his unfinished book

⭐This old classic (The First Man by Albert Camus), translated from the original French edition, tells the story of a young boy living in poverty and his trials and tribulations growing up, and how he deals with his father’s death and living with his deaf mute mother. The novel takes place in Algeria. An interesting bit of history on this book is that the author died in a car accident and this manuscript was found in his car and published later.I never give away too much information when reviewing any novel, but this classic book by the late Albert Camus is one you may want to check out.Rating: 4 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Martial Art and Warrior Haiku and Senryu)

⭐THE FIRST MAN begins in 1913, as the Pied Noir and farm manager Henri Cormery arrives at his new job. With Henri is his parturient wife, who promptly delivers a son that the Cormerys name Jacques. Then, Henri, a solider in the reserves, is called to active duty in the French army and is killed in 1914 at the Battle of the Marne. Ostensibly, TFM is the story of the 40 year old Jacques as he returns to the village of his birth, as well as visits his surviving relatives in Algiers, and tries to gain a sense of his unknown father and his life. But Camus, in using this approach, also writes a brilliant coming-of-age novel that considers the poor in history and surely captures what Albert Camus himself experienced as he grew up in a working-poor family in Algiers.In TFM, Jacques Cormery is unable to learn much about his father, who has been dead for forty years. At the most, Jacques is able to place his father within the context of the stoic original Pied Noirs, who were often political refuges of the 1848 French Revolution. Ultimately, Jacques attributes his father’s anonymity to his life in the working-poor. “There was a mystery about that man, a mystery he had wanted to penetrate. But after all there was only the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without a past, that sends them into the vast throng of the nameless dead who made the world while they themselves were destroyed forever.”At the same time, the brilliant Jacques has total recall of his own impoverished boyhood, which he conveys in a narrative of wonderful vignettes and character sketches. Here, I open TFM at random to the chapter entitled “Lycée”, where my marginalia includes such scene summations as: waking up early in a working class home; riding the trolley; peddlers in the arcade near the lycée; a schoolboy feud with a shopkeeper; and the fritter man. Anyway, you get the picture: All nuance in the life and character of Henri Cormery may be gone. But Jacques Cormery is able to recreate the world and personalities of his own impoverished boyhood. These will never disappear as long as there are readers for TFM.This is a terrific novel and quasi memoir and it’s HIGHLY recommended to those who have read and enjoyed “The Stranger”.

⭐Anyone who has read Camus’ other works will relish reading this. For those who haven’t, it’s probably best to start with “The Outsider” and “The Plague” before coming to “The First Man”.An unfinished autobiographical book, Camus leads us from his birth in the opening chapter, through his father’s death to his own discovery of himself as the first man, looking around for a moral compass, the moral compass that guides all of his books.Towards the end of the book as it was left he writes: “he always was [ready] to lie for pleasure but incapable of doing so out of necessity.” This provides a key of sorts to unlocking departments of “The Outsider”, and is just one of hundreds of such enlightening comments littered throughout the book.But the book doesn’t merely have value as a guide to Camus. It’s not an author’s lazy autobiographical book.The book emanates the smells and sounds of Algerian, the unbearable heat and the September rains. It is rich with balmy feeling that bring the hero’s poverty-stricken childhood off the page in a way that has never been equalled.The Algerian weather is something that sticks out in “The Outsider” as Mersault walks along the beach and shoots an Arab, tormenting Mersault and driving him to his destiny, as if it were inevitable (inevitability is another idea that is explored in “The First Man”).In “The First Man” he describes the summer heat as: “heavy, sweaty and roasting…even the memory of winter’s cool and its waters was lost, as if the earth had never known the wind, nor the snow, nor light waters,” linking it into another of his core themes: memory.Camus writes how memory is the reserve of the rich, and that the poor, as his family were, have no distinct memories as every day is the same, creating no distinct reference points for memory to stick to. It is this lack of past that connects back to his feelings of being “The First Man”: robbed of a father by World War I, robbed of a guiding source in life.This book is an outstanding piece of memoir, despite never being finished. It is rich in the stuff of life, overflowing with passion for existence, just as Camus was, and stuffed with the keys to Camus’ sensibility.

⭐This book is three things: it is an autobiography of a great writer; it is a novel, albeit unfinished, that evokes breathtakingly the atmospheres and social situations of post WWI colonial Algeria; and it is a wonderful insight into the processes of literary creation. In its autobiographical content it is necessary reading for any devotees of the man and his work. As a novel, unless we insist on such art forms as being formally complete and structurally sound, it is a magical evocation of Twentieth Century Algeria, its sounds, sights and smells. It is also a touching account of a deprived childhood, and a chronicle of the coming to terms with the loss of a father in such circumstances. Finally, from the standpoint of literary creation, the work is complete enough to thrill the reader, and the perception of the missing parts, augmented by Camus’ often cryptic notes gives a rare insight into the creative process. Its appearance, so long after Camus’ death, is a credit to his daughter, Catherine, and a considerable benefit to the world.

⭐An interesting account of Camus’ childhood life, one that seems to be a source for his lifelong attraction to Alrgiers, Oran, etc. However, it was vastly incomplete as his death (we’re told he planned an much more extensive auto-biolgraphy). As it is, this short account, while readable, gives to this reader little other insight as to his mature beliefs.

⭐Once in a while you come across a book that is so beautifully written, so closely observed and so poignant in its observation of life and poverty that it changes you for ever.Camus’ semi-biographical account of a young boy’s childhood in French Tunisia is just such a book. Buy it! Now! It will change you too.

⭐A deeply moving and telling book about Camus himself. Though presented as a novel, and an unfinished one, it reveals more about Camus himself and the process of his writing than any of his other books.

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