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Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 0783816014
ISBN-13: 9780783816012
Mar 1996
Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
359 pages
Large Print
Language: English |
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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Synopsis
The manuscript to this unfinished novel was found in the wreckage of the car in which Camus perished. It was withheld from publication at the time of Camus' death, as it was believed that it would be savaged by his detractors. THE FIRST MAN is the first volume of Camus's projected epic, WAR AND PEACE, and covers the years of his childhood in Algeria. He tells of growing up fatherless with a deaf-mute mother and an illiterate, tyrannical grandmother; of poverty transcended by escapes to the beach, to the streets and docks, and joyous hunting expeditions with his uncle. His love for his silent mother is deeply rooted, but deeper still is the void left behind by his father's absence. With the miraculous intervention of a wise schoolteacher, the young boy discovers learning and gains a sense of purpose, which he still must reconcile with his family's illiterate, working-class origins.
| Size | | Length: | 359 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 24.8 oz |
Industry Reviews
"The book is a fascinating autobiographical novel, told in the third person (heightening the semblance of fiction), and represents a search for the author's self as well as a kind of testament. The novel helps put all of Camus' work into a clearer perspective and brings into relief what separates him form the more militant literary personalities of his day, like Malraux and Sartre....His richest perceptions are sensuous and poetic."
New York Times Book Review - Victor Brombert (08/27/1995)
"The reader of 'The First Man' will be inclined to echo the sentiments of Camus's biographer Patrick MacCarthy, who has argued (with only a little hyperbole) that the author's 'life and writing were shaped by a few images of his childhood--the Mediterranean, the sudden silence of the Algiers evening and, above all, his mother.'...Serves as a kind of magical Rosetta stone to Camus's entire career, illuminating both his life and his work with stunning candor and passion."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (08/25/1995)
"Personal but never sentimental, this is a bittersweet story about finding one's place in the world without betraying one's origins. Had he lived, this famously private author would probably have chosen to reveal less about himself....The ironic bright spot in the otherwise tragic circumstance of his death is that he never got that chance."
Newsweek - Malcolm Jones Jr. (09/04/1995)
"...surely Catherine Camus did her father a great service to offer this last testament in its raw form....As tightly written as a thriller, it is a classic of Existentialism..."
Montreal Gazette - Marianne Ackerman (09/12/1995)
"It's hard to believe any reader could have been blind to the work's distinctive merits....the very incompleteness of the work validates its power....All honor to Catherine Camus for offering us this invaluable glimpse into the life and art of a writer who may have been greater than we knew then or can know even now."
Kirkus Reviews (07/15/1995)
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