A review by voe
The First Man by Albert Camus

4.0

In awe of Camus's writing. This is his last (and unfinished) novel, and very clearly an autobiographical account of his own life and childhood. There is a certain uniqueness to how he portrays the world and the characters, and intricate sentences which left me marveling at how good it must have been in the original French. I was moved by his account of his poverty-stricken childhood, and yet it doesn't come across as a just a sob story, but a deeply personal coming-of-age tale as he switches between his present and the past. His growing up without a father, in the scorching heat of Algiers, his love for his semi-deaf mother, how the war affected all those poor people who died for a country which was not even their own... even though it is so starkly different from my own, it did make me reminisce about my own childhood and how things change as we grow up.

The writing is very well-crafted in certain chapters, excellently describing the environment and the characters and sets the scene of how it must be like to live in the country, without being too verbose. I would not have believed that such a seemingly "boring" account of a man and his childhood would be such an interesting read. 4/5