Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.84 AVERAGE
3.84 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I feel like I've been reading this book forever. My biggest gripe with the book is that it is unfinished. This is clearly a draft of a book in progress, and it has not been edited and Camus' own notes appear as footnotes. I knew all of this before I started, but it was still bothersome.
The reason that its unfinished status matters so much is because without some editing and revision, the pieces of the book fail to coalesce into a story. As is, the book reads like a series of vignettes that run between insignificant and epiphanous. I want to appreciate this vacillation between the mundane and the revelatory as a feature of the text. That is how our lives unfold, so in a way, it makes sense, but the lack of cohesion still makes me want a more complete book.
The book does a good job of delving into themes without the cynicism of many of Camus' other books. This one is not meant to be as heady as it is about the real objects and events of life as it is lived day-to-day. Camus said he wanted this book to be "heavy with things and flesh," and it is. It's about the freedom of childhood, a nobility in poverty, family, the search for a father, and growing up. The First Man has a lot going on. I just wish it was better.
The reason that its unfinished status matters so much is because without some editing and revision, the pieces of the book fail to coalesce into a story. As is, the book reads like a series of vignettes that run between insignificant and epiphanous. I want to appreciate this vacillation between the mundane and the revelatory as a feature of the text. That is how our lives unfold, so in a way, it makes sense, but the lack of cohesion still makes me want a more complete book.
The book does a good job of delving into themes without the cynicism of many of Camus' other books. This one is not meant to be as heady as it is about the real objects and events of life as it is lived day-to-day. Camus said he wanted this book to be "heavy with things and flesh," and it is. It's about the freedom of childhood, a nobility in poverty, family, the search for a father, and growing up. The First Man has a lot going on. I just wish it was better.
A Hunger for Discovery
This is Camus’s last work. But for anyone interested in his philosophy, or more importantly the reasons for his philosophy, this should probably be the first to read. The First Man is intensely emotional without being sentimental, self-critical without regrets, and above all human with a humanness which is, I think, the key to everything else he wrote.
The book shows Camus as a person shaped in his intentions as well as his vices by a most remarkable and unlikely multi-cultural background of poverty, intellectual depravation and what can only be called highly disciplined love: “They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.” The narrative is not so much biographical as episodic, recounting the obviously most important emotional events and recognitions of his life. The dominant theme, only emerging explicitly in middle age, is the search for the hidden personality of his dead father, killed in the Great War during Camus’s infancy.
Jacques, Camus’s fictionalised Self, was aware of some vague deficiency, “There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurt,” he says. The source of this feeling only becomes clear upon the discovery of his father’s war grave almost forty years after his death. The epiphany at the graveside is instant and profound:
Is it right to think that this is a confession of a moral conversion, a conversion from a sort of resentful resistance to the world to a sympathetic acceptance of its infinite depth and complexity? I think so. And it certainly changes my appreciation of Camus in his roles as writer, philosopher, and political activist. Although he is in many ways representative of his time and place - the radical post-war politics of France - he was never a product of his times. He was from elsewhere, literally in his Algerian upbringing, and intellectually in his appreciation of the non-intellectual foundations of life. His family, his neighbours, his friends “looked on life with a resigned suspicion; they loved it as animals do, but they knew from experience that it would regularly give birth to disaster without even showing any sign that it was carrying it.”
Camus was, if we take Jacques literally as his mouthpiece, a “sceptical believer,” not in religion or fate or ideology, but in the necessity for ever wider and deeper human discovery. Ultimately this belief is an aesthetic, a filter which allows him to reconfigure the previously perceived ugliness of the France of his adulthood in terms of the impoverished but definite beauty of his Algerian mother, the devotion of his remarkably tenacious family, the care of an outstanding teacher, and the unhesitating dutifulness of his mysterious father. But it is this last that psychically drives all the rest; the skeleton key to his life. Only by opening himself to this loss was he able to relax into himself: “at last he could sleep and he could come back to the childhood from which he had never recovered.”
This is Camus’s last work. But for anyone interested in his philosophy, or more importantly the reasons for his philosophy, this should probably be the first to read. The First Man is intensely emotional without being sentimental, self-critical without regrets, and above all human with a humanness which is, I think, the key to everything else he wrote.
The book shows Camus as a person shaped in his intentions as well as his vices by a most remarkable and unlikely multi-cultural background of poverty, intellectual depravation and what can only be called highly disciplined love: “They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.” The narrative is not so much biographical as episodic, recounting the obviously most important emotional events and recognitions of his life. The dominant theme, only emerging explicitly in middle age, is the search for the hidden personality of his dead father, killed in the Great War during Camus’s infancy.
Jacques, Camus’s fictionalised Self, was aware of some vague deficiency, “There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurt,” he says. The source of this feeling only becomes clear upon the discovery of his father’s war grave almost forty years after his death. The epiphany at the graveside is instant and profound:
“... in the strange dizziness of that moment, the statue every man eventually erects and that hardens in the fire of the years, into which he then creeps and there awaits its final crumbling – that statue was rapidly cracking, it was already collapsing. All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but for ever.”
Is it right to think that this is a confession of a moral conversion, a conversion from a sort of resentful resistance to the world to a sympathetic acceptance of its infinite depth and complexity? I think so. And it certainly changes my appreciation of Camus in his roles as writer, philosopher, and political activist. Although he is in many ways representative of his time and place - the radical post-war politics of France - he was never a product of his times. He was from elsewhere, literally in his Algerian upbringing, and intellectually in his appreciation of the non-intellectual foundations of life. His family, his neighbours, his friends “looked on life with a resigned suspicion; they loved it as animals do, but they knew from experience that it would regularly give birth to disaster without even showing any sign that it was carrying it.”
Camus was, if we take Jacques literally as his mouthpiece, a “sceptical believer,” not in religion or fate or ideology, but in the necessity for ever wider and deeper human discovery. Ultimately this belief is an aesthetic, a filter which allows him to reconfigure the previously perceived ugliness of the France of his adulthood in terms of the impoverished but definite beauty of his Algerian mother, the devotion of his remarkably tenacious family, the care of an outstanding teacher, and the unhesitating dutifulness of his mysterious father. But it is this last that psychically drives all the rest; the skeleton key to his life. Only by opening himself to this loss was he able to relax into himself: “at last he could sleep and he could come back to the childhood from which he had never recovered.”
bra bok! jag älskar camus! lite mer spänning så hade det fan nog blivit en 5a.
It breaks my heart that this book will never be finished.
The actual bulk of the plot wasn't my favorite -- no matter the author I never enjoy plots focusing around childhood/adolescence. However, the small glimpses of Jacques as a grown man and Camus' notes at the end make this a worthwhile read, in my opinion.
October’s book club theme was heritage so I decided to read a book about the « pied noir » author Albert Camus on his childhood in Algeria. To get a glimpse of the childhood of the grandmother I never truly knew who lived almost half of her life in North Africa (a life so removed and so foreign to my own) before having to leave (due to the war) for France: « une terre inconnue au delà des mers» (rainy cloudy Brittany to add insult to injury!
Gorgeously written even in this draft form. It's like Camus was trying to construct a quasi-romantic history of a people he felt was getting a bad rap (as they should 'cause they were goddamn colonizers). But the text is really pessimistic about this possibility so complex feelings arise.
The First Man stands apart from the rest of Camus's works in my opinion. Most of Camus's writing weighs heavy with philosophy, and while there's plenty to think about in this book, The First Man reads more like a memoir of the author's childhood than an allegory on absurdism.
The First Man is a roman a clef that illustrates the amazingly humble childhood of a great philosopher and writer. The novel was unfinished at the time of Camus's death, and, interestingly, it has been published with the author's annotations, footnotes, endnotes and sketches. At one point, Camus mistakenly used his last name instead of the main character's, which speaks to how closely some of the events described in the book resemble the author's life.
And an amazing life it was. Months after Camus, known in the novel as Jacques Cormery, was born, his father died in action in World War I. Thus, the burden of raising Jacques fell on his deaf and blind mother. Jacques's grandmother helped rear the child, however, while the mother worked as a laundress for the neighbors. This made for a rather abject living condition, and the way Camus describes growing up in poverty is eye-opening and heartbreaking.
Fortunately, Jacques was a gifted student, and his teacher helped him get a scholarship to attend secondary school--which enabled him to eventually rise out of his poverty.
Ugh, my review is making The First Man sound like a Ragged Dick story, which it is not because it isn't so much about escaping poverty in terms of wealth, it is about escaping poverty in terms of life. Camus describes his native Algeria as a place where:
He goes on to say:
The First Man explains how Camus became 'the first man' by becoming a self-actualized, moral, social human being. It is a process we all go through, and it works in stages.
To help us through the stages of life, we must rely on the wisdom of others, and in The First Man, Camus describes the illuminating quality of literature, saying that he devoured library books indiscriminately and copiously, "retaining just about nothing, except a strange and powerful emotion, that, over the years, would give birth to and nurture a whole universe of ideas and memories that never yielded to the reality of [his] daily life."
Camus's story vividly describes the brutal reality of his daily life as a child, but despite the harshness of his condition, the novel is full of hope. It feels like a fond recollection. It was truly a joy to read.
The First Man is a roman a clef that illustrates the amazingly humble childhood of a great philosopher and writer. The novel was unfinished at the time of Camus's death, and, interestingly, it has been published with the author's annotations, footnotes, endnotes and sketches. At one point, Camus mistakenly used his last name instead of the main character's, which speaks to how closely some of the events described in the book resemble the author's life.
And an amazing life it was. Months after Camus, known in the novel as Jacques Cormery, was born, his father died in action in World War I. Thus, the burden of raising Jacques fell on his deaf and blind mother. Jacques's grandmother helped rear the child, however, while the mother worked as a laundress for the neighbors. This made for a rather abject living condition, and the way Camus describes growing up in poverty is eye-opening and heartbreaking.
Fortunately, Jacques was a gifted student, and his teacher helped him get a scholarship to attend secondary school--which enabled him to eventually rise out of his poverty.
Ugh, my review is making The First Man sound like a Ragged Dick story, which it is not because it isn't so much about escaping poverty in terms of wealth, it is about escaping poverty in terms of life. Camus describes his native Algeria as a place where:
whole mobs had been coming for more than a century, had plowed, dug furrows,... until the dusty earth covered them over and the place went back to its wild vegetation; and they procreated, then disappeared. And so it was with their sons. And the sons and grandsons of these found themselves on this land...with no past, without ethics, without guidance...All those generations, all those men come from so many nations, had disappeared without a trace, locked within themselves. An enormous oblivion spread over them.
He goes on to say:
and he who had wanted to escape from the country without name, from the crowd and a family without name...wandering through the night of the years in the land of oblivion, where each one is the first man, where he had to bring himself up without a father, ..., and he had to learn by himself, to grow alone in fortitude, in strength, to find his own morality and truth, at last to be born as a man and to be born again in a harder childbirth, which consists of being born in relation to others.
The First Man explains how Camus became 'the first man' by becoming a self-actualized, moral, social human being. It is a process we all go through, and it works in stages.
To help us through the stages of life, we must rely on the wisdom of others, and in The First Man, Camus describes the illuminating quality of literature, saying that he devoured library books indiscriminately and copiously, "retaining just about nothing, except a strange and powerful emotion, that, over the years, would give birth to and nurture a whole universe of ideas and memories that never yielded to the reality of [his] daily life."
Camus's story vividly describes the brutal reality of his daily life as a child, but despite the harshness of his condition, the novel is full of hope. It feels like a fond recollection. It was truly a joy to read.