It is reallly not fair to rate a work that is not complete. As an artist, I know how horrifying it is to show unfinished works to anybody. It really is a violation. However, whether this is Camus's first draft or 2nd draft, the evidence is everywhere what kind of great book it would have been had he had a chance to edit it, re-structure and re-write it. It was a great learning experience for me to study what a potential...
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_The First Man_ was published by the late author's daughter, Catherine Camus. Largely autobiographical, the manuscript was raw, uncorrected and unfinished at the time of Camus's death. In it Camus speaks of the father he never met, who was killed in combat in World War I. Camus, called "Jacques Cormery" in the novel, was raised by his strong-willed grandmother, a strict disciplinarian who would punish Jacques for wearing...
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It is better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass graves. -Albert CamusThis 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,...
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"~Great book, I had read The Stranger and was captivated by that; The First Man seems to be more autobiographical. It seems to capture the existentialist predicament of being thrown into the world not of one's own making, having the circumstances of your life dictated by chance but still being responsible for who you are and what you become. It seems the protagonist struggles to create himself; and in that sense he is...
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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...
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