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A review by savaging
The First Man by Albert Camus
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.