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salbulga's review
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
acantha's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
el_entrenador_loco's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
dobeesquared's review against another edition
4.0
Heureuse de l'avoir lu, aimant tant l'écriture de Camus. Le texte a vraiment l'air d'un oeuvre toujours en train d'être décidé, ce qui n'empêche pas qu'il y a des passages très beaux et aussi des déscriptions prenants de l'Algérie de l'époque et aussi la vie sans bc de moyens. Si l'on aime déjà Camus, on va l'aimer encore plus après ce recit.
issybattista's review
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Cried through most of it just because I loved it. Will spend years analyzing Camus’ notes just trying to envision what he was planning for the rest of the novel.
iuanto's review
challenging
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
The First Man is Camus's finest work. Having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus was considered by many to be finished as a writer by the time he died in 1960. Posterity has proven otherwise, and The First Man is the work of a writer still very much at his peak.
Camus's novels are deeply personal, the stories woven from the tapestry of his own life, but none of them are as raw and as intimate as The First Man. Camus's daughter Catherine speculates in her introduction whether such intimacy would have survived into the finished novel. Likely, it would not, so the publication of the manuscript and accompanying notes gives us a rare insight into Camus's thinking as he pulled together his life's story.
The First Man is an autobiography in all but name, told through the protagonist, Jacques, who grows up, rootless and poor, in Algiers. Jacques's disconnection from his past, from his roots, is exemplified by his ambivalence towards his dead father.
The story begins with the forty-year-old Jacques travelling to northern France to visit his father's war grave. Jacques feels no real connection to the father he never knew, just as his father, had no ties to a country he'd never seen, yet fought and died for.
As Jacques looks back over his life, we are transported back to Algeria and immersed in the tastes and smells of another world. Camus's passionate and sensuous portrait of his childhood is both beautiful and heartbreaking. It's impossible not to be moved by his unbounded love for his mother and by his anguished impotence in the face of her suffering.
The hardships of poverty are relentless and soul-destroying, with little room for indulgence or frivolity. Triumphs, when they come, are modest; games with friends, stolen fruit, hunting with his uncle, but Jacques relishes each one with his whole being, drinking it in and living each moment to the full before it is gone again.
As always with Camus, the tragedies of life, both everyday and world-shattering, are centre-stage, and while it would be easy to fall into despair and nihilism, Jacques, like Camus, never gives in. His passion for life, for learning, and for writing, spur him on, and the love of his family, friends and favourite teacher provide the soil for his nascent roots which infuse his life with meaning.
Jacques's story was never finished but we know that Camus went on to be perhaps the greatest writer of his generation and that his personal philosophy, articulated so exquisitely in The First Man, is one that speaks to modern readers even more profoundly than it did for his contemporaries.
I have re-read many books but usually wait at least a couple of years. When I finished The First Man, I was already thinking about when I might read it again.
Camus's novels are deeply personal, the stories woven from the tapestry of his own life, but none of them are as raw and as intimate as The First Man. Camus's daughter Catherine speculates in her introduction whether such intimacy would have survived into the finished novel. Likely, it would not, so the publication of the manuscript and accompanying notes gives us a rare insight into Camus's thinking as he pulled together his life's story.
The First Man is an autobiography in all but name, told through the protagonist, Jacques, who grows up, rootless and poor, in Algiers. Jacques's disconnection from his past, from his roots, is exemplified by his ambivalence towards his dead father.
The story begins with the forty-year-old Jacques travelling to northern France to visit his father's war grave. Jacques feels no real connection to the father he never knew, just as his father, had no ties to a country he'd never seen, yet fought and died for.
As Jacques looks back over his life, we are transported back to Algeria and immersed in the tastes and smells of another world. Camus's passionate and sensuous portrait of his childhood is both beautiful and heartbreaking. It's impossible not to be moved by his unbounded love for his mother and by his anguished impotence in the face of her suffering.
The hardships of poverty are relentless and soul-destroying, with little room for indulgence or frivolity. Triumphs, when they come, are modest; games with friends, stolen fruit, hunting with his uncle, but Jacques relishes each one with his whole being, drinking it in and living each moment to the full before it is gone again.
As always with Camus, the tragedies of life, both everyday and world-shattering, are centre-stage, and while it would be easy to fall into despair and nihilism, Jacques, like Camus, never gives in. His passion for life, for learning, and for writing, spur him on, and the love of his family, friends and favourite teacher provide the soil for his nascent roots which infuse his life with meaning.
Jacques's story was never finished but we know that Camus went on to be perhaps the greatest writer of his generation and that his personal philosophy, articulated so exquisitely in The First Man, is one that speaks to modern readers even more profoundly than it did for his contemporaries.
I have re-read many books but usually wait at least a couple of years. When I finished The First Man, I was already thinking about when I might read it again.
renny's review
3.0
Interesting in that it wasn’t finished and contains notes and edits, but also dragged on and I felt like it’d hardly matter if I paid close attention to the story.
savaging's review
3.0
The last words in the manuscript found in the wreckage of the crash that killed Camus at 46:
"an unalloyed passion for life confronting utter death; today he felt life, youth, people slipping away from him, without being able to hold on to any of them, left with the blind hope that this obscure force that for so many years had raised him above the daily routine, nourished him unstintingly, and been equal to the most difficult circumstances -- that, as it had with endless generosity given him reason to live, it would also give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion."
When this incomplete work was finally published in 1995, Camus' daughter wrote "it seems to me that one can most clearly hear my father's voice in this text because of its very rawness."
But Camus was a writer who believed in the hard labor and time of writing (from an interview: "creation is an intellectual and bodily discipline, a school of energy. I have never achieved anything in anarchy or physical slackness"). He saw himself as a new classicist in defiance of his time, where writers were all eager to serve up a slice of life on the run: "A minimum of preparation, a few strips of bacon, two or three flowers of fluted paper, and the meat is served raw" (On Jules Roy’s La Vallee Heureuse).
This is all to say that I felt a lot of tenderness toward this book, but I also found it dull. I missed the more polished (or cooked) Camus. If nothing else, I missed his sentences -- nobody else can write sentences like that.
"an unalloyed passion for life confronting utter death; today he felt life, youth, people slipping away from him, without being able to hold on to any of them, left with the blind hope that this obscure force that for so many years had raised him above the daily routine, nourished him unstintingly, and been equal to the most difficult circumstances -- that, as it had with endless generosity given him reason to live, it would also give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion."
When this incomplete work was finally published in 1995, Camus' daughter wrote "it seems to me that one can most clearly hear my father's voice in this text because of its very rawness."
But Camus was a writer who believed in the hard labor and time of writing (from an interview: "creation is an intellectual and bodily discipline, a school of energy. I have never achieved anything in anarchy or physical slackness"). He saw himself as a new classicist in defiance of his time, where writers were all eager to serve up a slice of life on the run: "A minimum of preparation, a few strips of bacon, two or three flowers of fluted paper, and the meat is served raw" (On Jules Roy’s La Vallee Heureuse).
This is all to say that I felt a lot of tenderness toward this book, but I also found it dull. I missed the more polished (or cooked) Camus. If nothing else, I missed his sentences -- nobody else can write sentences like that.
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