The First Man

Rating:
Summary: POPSPICK PLUS
Review: Don't miss this book. For teachers the last two chapters of this book are worth the price of the book. It leaves a lasting impression.

Rating:
Summary: A less cerebral, more intimate and revealing openness
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Albert Camus' The First Man - we have no right to read this
Review: I was going to read this book. I bought it for a graduate class I'm taking in the English department at the university where I am attaining my Master's. Then I looked into the history a bit and decided that to read this book would be to engage in ideological rape. Albert Camus did not give his CONSENT to publish this book in this version. Period. Posthumous publishing of a dead author's UNCOMPLETED work or works is immoral and unethical. I don't need to quench my voyeuristic thirst by reading something the author never intended me to read. Some might argue otherwise, but I just don't see how peeking at your sibling's diary is EVER justified. It is someone else's private property, we don't have a right to read it without their permission.

Sincerely,

Sean Hooks

Rating:
Summary: a must for grown-ups whose past means anything to them
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Brilliant
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An important, thrilling grounding in Camus and our values.
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: his best, tragically unfinished
Review: 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+

Rating:
Summary: his best, tragically unfinished
Review: 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+

Rating:
Summary: redemption at last
Review: It is, after all, about their own lives that writers write best. Here is no exception, and this book, far beyond any other recollection of childhood I have ever read, exhumes the anguish of memory. The chronicle of his past is underscored by poverty, but out of that, Camus has built an evocation of childhood that overcomes bitterness and misanthropy and finds redemption. Somehow, Camus has emerged as the completed man, the mature man, who can finally be consoled, rather than confronted, by his own past; above all, he has sketched his life as an emotional journey, and in finding solace in the destination to which he has arrived, for better or worse, he elevates those principle forces that steered his course, his mother and his childhood instructor. This is indeed, as Camus himself termed it, the novel of his maturity, and the only unfulfilling aspect of his story is that it will remain unfinished. As the story relates, however, we can always find happiness in what we have, even if it is not exactly all that we wanted.

Rating:
Summary: _First_Man_ personal, beguiling reflection of author
Review: M. Camus' unmistakable style reaches its highest expression in this book. In reading this book, one gets the feeling that the man has finally discovered how to tell his whole personal story, including tears and laughter, without sacrificing precision or austerity of expression. The feeling that results is that the reader has gone back in time and met Camus himself in some cafe, and that reader and writer are each finding what Camus called "the writer's royal reward" in exchanging their stories. As happens with all "first drafts," the story sometimes gets bogged down in a sea of details or in confusion as Camus reveals too much by using the real names of characters, but these add to the personality revealed. Indeed, when the reader reaches such passages, he/she can almost see the man having to stop for a moment to laugh, cringe, or even weep at the recollection of powerful memories from home, childhood, and school. The plentiful notes by author and editor make the book an intriguing insight into the writing process, and the correspondence added at the end between Camus and the elementary school teacher he speaks of so much in the story will touch any teacher or student