Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 9, 1994 TAG: 9407120031
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Medium
The winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature was killed instantly, his mangled body pinned in the wreckage for more than two hours. Only his black briefcase, muddied and slashed, survived intact.
Inside were photos, books and a 144-page manuscript that turned out to be the 46-year-old writer's last words: an incomplete draft of an autobiographical novel titled ``Le Premier Homme.''
Thirty-four years after it landed in a ditch, ``The First Man'' is on the best-seller list, with 200,000 copies sold since publication in April.
``In France, those sales figures are quite exceptional, especially for a classical writer,'' said Helene de Saint Hippolyte, a spokeswoman for the Gallimard publishing house.
``Camus' `The Stranger' remains our biggest-selling book, read widely by young people, so it's logical that there's so much interest in the new book,'' she said. ``Even though the text is incomplete, it's full of details about his childhood and adolescence and is very moving.''
The English-language version, to be published by Alfred Knopf, is expected to come out in 1995.
Camus scholars have long known of the manuscript's existence. But Camus' widow, Francine, and later his daughter, Catherine, long opposed publication because they feared the unfinished text would not stand up to scrutiny and could further tarnish his already dwindling reputation at home.
By the time Camus died on Jan. 4, 1960, he was out of favor with the Parisian intelligentsia led by the powerhouse couple Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Literary critics also had found new favorites in the innovative ``new novelists'' such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Saurraute and Michel Butor.
At the time, Camus' stark prose and moralistic tone seemed old-fashioned. His conservative politics and what many perceived as his nostalgia for life in his native Algeria, then fighting for independence from France, were not politically correct.
Camus was known as a perfectionist in his work. ``The Stranger,'' his novel about moral bankruptcy and alienation set in Algeria - a staple in American high school literature classes - was revised six times before it went to press.
``Le Premier Homme'' was cleaned up considerably for publication. Using magnifying lenses and photographic enlargement, the family spent years deciphering the illegible scrawl, deletions and additions penned in the margins.
``I was very afraid of publishing the text ... Camus wouldn't be there to defend himself. I wanted to present the text in its raw state, with no interpretations,'' Catherine Camus told the newspaper Le Monde.
``Camus appears without a mask, without defenses. Maybe that's what touched readers,'' she said.
Indeed, the book shows a lively, humane side of Camus that does not emerge from his other fictional work.
He was born and raised in the slums of Algiers by his stern paternal grandmother, and a loving, attentive mother who was partially deaf and completely illiterate.
His father was killed during World War I when he was a year old.
One of the key autobiographical scenes in the book is when Jacques Cormery, the 35-year-old narrator, kneels down on his father's grave and discovers that he died at 30. Camus visited his father's grave in Saint-Brieuc when he was 34.
Critics say the scene explains the title: fatherless, he becomes ``the first man.''
For Antoine de Gaudemar, a literary critic for the daily Liberation, the title also evokes the French settler seeking a new life in colonial Algeria.
Camus was a fourth-generation ``pied noir,'' or black foot, the expression used to describe French settlers in North Africa.
``(The first man) is the immigrant, banned or in voluntary exile, without family or inheritance, landing with nothing and beginning life anew,'' De Gaudemar wrote.
Pierre Assouline, editor of the magazine Lire, called the book ``magnificent,'' while Jean-Jacques Brochier, editor of the ``Magazine Litteraire,'' dismissed it as ``adolescent and whiny.''
by CNB