Customer Reviews (4)

A double value
The notebooks are valuable as the record of a life, and also as a kind of preliminary sketchbook to the works. Here one can see Camus groping toward the chrystallization of his most significant works. The aphoristic and descriptive beauty of some of the passages also add to the value of the work.

An existentialist in the process
After reading all of Camus' works I read his notebooks, and all of it sudden his track of mind made sense. You can clearly see the train of thoughts before The Stranger and The Fall. This book is essential for anyone who is into existentialism, absurdism and their derivatives.

I would like to say this is more of a philosophical book, but Albert's desire was always to be recognized as a writer more than a thinker. His entries are of an artist expressing his lassitude towards meaning and some paragraphs are harsh while criticizing war, love and human nature. If you are overly religious, this book may not be for you.

Great collection of entries fromwriter who should've won more Nobel Prizes and who is the father of modern existentialism.. still.

Albert Camus, writer.
For too many decades and by too many college instructors, Albert Camus has been clumped together with Jean-Paul Sartre and others under the heading of "Existentialist". This collection of Camus' notebooks indicates that there were many other things going on in his thinking, and Existentialism was hardly one of them. In fact, several revealing excerpts show us a man who disagreed with it fundamentally.

That aside, what it really presents to the reader is that Camus is first and foremost a writer. Whether it's creative writing, critical writing, reflective writing, etc., he was accomplished at all of them. His description of a sunset, quaint as it might sound, is so beautiful it's almost heartbreaking. Meanwhile, his political observations are keen, with a strong sense of urgency.

Equally fascinating is to observe his literary works taking shape: to see the mind of a writer putting a major opus together. To me, this is the major contribution of the book. I highly recommend this book to aspiring writers, diarists, or to anyone interested in the mid-20th century thought. That goes for Existentialists too.

Great insight to his work
This novel , more like a autobiography is great because in it he tells of certain unforgetable conversations and ideas that his mind has come up with.It just makes me want to read more of his work because now i know how he gets some of his ideas and the process he goes through in creating a grea novel.Although the notes are written in a form that is different then usual , they are great to read.I recomend it. ... Read more

Product Description
From 1935 until his death, Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks to sketch out ideas for future works, record snatches of conversations and excerpts from books he was reading, and jot down his reflections on death and the horror of war, his feelings about women and loneliness and art, and his appreciations for the Algerian sun and sea. These three volumes, now available together for the first time in paperback, include all entries made from the time when Camus was still completely unknown in Europe, until he was killed in an automobile accident in 1960, at the height of his creative powers. In 1957 he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A spiritual and intellectual auto biography, Camus' Notebooks are invariably more concerned with what he felt than with what he did. It is i ntriguing for the reader to watch him seize and develop certain themes and ideas, discard others that at f irst seemed promising, and explore different types of experience. ... Read more

Product Description
The full French text of Camus' novel is accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Authentically Camus
This spare and lucid novella is one of Camus' finest.The extended monologue format is intriguing, and the fact that it was a rather nasty send-up of many of the existentialists with whom Camus had had afalling-out was especially marvelous.One is reminded of Dostoevsky's TheUnderground but, Camus' message is far easier to swallow.La Chute can'thelp but confirm Camus' brilliance as a writer.

El mejor libro de Albert Camus, una verdadera obra de arte
Un libro excepecional, tanto por el argumento como por la forma en que esta escrito. Un agudo analisis de la sociedad y del hombre. Para leer varias veces. Lei un comentario en Amazon sobre este libro que decia que lahistoria era poco creible pero que lo recomendaba porque tenia pocaspaginas. Una verdadera estupidez. ¿De donde saco este buen señor que lahistoria tiene que ser creible? ¿Y si la historia fuese lo de menos? ¿Sepuede recomendar un libro solo porque tiene pocas paginas? ¿Es que acaso"Los demonios" de Dostoyevski, o "Los HermanosKaramazov" no son recomendables porque tienen mas de 700 paginas?

a man tels his lifetime story to another frenchman in a cafe
the book is good written but the story itsselfs is a bit dull and also a bit unbelievebale but i recommend anybody to read this book for school because the book has only 77 pages!!!!! ... Read more

Product Description
When Albert Camus died in a car crash in January 1960 he was only 46 years old - already a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a world figure - author of the enigmatic The Stranger, the fable called The Plague, but also of the combative The Rebel - which attacked the 'politically correct' among his contemporaries.

Thanks to his early literary achievement, his work for the underground newspaper Combat and his editorship of that daily in its Post-Liberation incarnation, Camus' voice seemed the conscience of postwar France. But it was a very personal voice that rejected the conventional wisdom, rejected ideologies that called for killing in the cause of justice. His call for personal responsibility will seem equally applicable today, when Camus' voice is silent and has not been replaced. The secrecy which surrounded Algerian-born Camus' own life, public and private - a function of illness and psychological self-defense in a Paris in which he still felt himself a stranger - seemed to make the biographer's job impossible.

Lottman's Albert Camus was the first and remains the definitive biography - even in France. On publication it was hailed by New York Times reviewer John Leonard: "What emerges from Mr. Lottman's tireless devotions is a portrait of the artist, the outsider, the humanist and skeptic, that breaks the heart." In The New York Times Book Review British critic John Sturrock said: Herbert Lottman's life (of Camus) is the first to be written, either in French or English, and it is exhaustive, a labor of love and of wonderful industry." When the book appeared in London Christopher Hitchens in New Statesman told British readers: "Lottman has written a brilliant and absorbing book... The detail and the care are extraordinary... Now at last we have a clear voice about the importance of liberty and the importance of being concrete."The new edition by Gingko Press includes a specially written preface by the author revealing the challenges of a biographer, of some of the problems that had to be dealt with while writing the book and after it appeared. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Well written, interesting, but the author doesn't understand French
This is an odd book. While it's well written and thoroughly researched, there are glaring errors in the author's translations from the French. For example, there are two instances (in the first couple hundred pages; I've only read that much so far) where he uses the false friend "sympathetic" for "sympatique", which means "nice": "I'll introduce him to some sympathetic people." There are many examples of mis-translations, which stand out because they are common errors (I'm fluent in French and translate from French to English) even if the original texts aren't included. Other translations are clunky and in some cases make no sense.

Now all this could be moot if the book were reliable, but as I go on reading it, I wonder just how well the author understood the texts he read in his research or the people he met and talked with. I've noticed a number of bits that are different between this bio and the one by Olivier Todd, written decades later, suggesting that the latter work, in spite of its faults, may at least be more reliable.

As I said in my review of the Todd book, it's a shame that there is no good biography of Camus in either French or English.

An admirable effort misses the forest for the trees
A long time ago, I started trying to think somewhat seriously about whether life without God had any meaning. A friend pointed me to Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. So I read it - twice actually. And I went on to read The Stranger, The Plague and even The Rebel. I found in those books some powerful passages (and in the case of The Plague, a pretty good story) and considerable evidence that their author was a decent man, writing in indecent times. But to be honest, Camus' underlying message eluded me. I found his philosophical musings needlessly complicated. Why, for example, does he start The Myth of Sisyphus by asking whether life's absurdity demands suicide? Surely, the survival instinct alone renders the question meaningless; not to mention the possibility of experiencing earthly pleasure. Isn't a better question - the one I wanted answered anyway - how, not whether, to live in a world with no God watching over us? But I wasn't ready to give up on Camus. So I picked up this biography in search of clarity. I didn't get it. Lottman is no better at explaining Camus' philosophy (to me) than Camus himself. Take this Camus line, transcribed as if it were self-evident: "There is only one case in which despair is pure. It is that of a man sentenced to die.'' Huh? What about a parent who loses a child? What about a man or woman betrayed by someone they love? Is their despair somehow different from "pure despair"? And if so, does it matter? Lottman does do a valuable service in compiling the details of Camus' life. He is a relentless searcher of truth, separating fact from myth, getting the dates right, admitting when the evidence is unclear. It's yeoman's work, and deserves praise. And he makes a long story readable. His feisty preface to this new edition is a wonderful rebuke to those who supported Stalin's butchery and condemned Camus (who, as an earlier Amazon review nicely put it, had the good fortune to be "hated by idiots.") But Lottman sometimes doesn't see the forest for the trees and doesn't always put Camus' activities in a context that gives them meaning - assuming, apparently, that the reader already understands the backdrop. For example, I still don't totally understand the Camus-Sartre split, though Lottman tells us the names of the cafes and magazines in which it played out. In summary, this is a valuable book for Camus scholars and those already grounded in his philosophy. For the rest of us, the search continues.

reiterating what has already been said
i agree with both comments below. lottman did an excellent job in his research. and ,at times, he seems to hesitate to cut out all the extra detail that makes it an unnecessarily long read. but i really have to commend him for the work he did. you can find any information you need if you're doing research on camus, all you have to do is look a little.

what i most enjoyed, however, was the feel of lottman's writing. you can just tell that lottman knows his subject and has the right kind of passionate drive to deliver the biography.

This is the Single Best Camus Biography
I think I most love this magnificent book because the chilly reception it has received mirrors the deeply ironic incivility the French elite reserved for Camus himself.One can love Camus for his words, his insight, and his passion, but I think I love him most for the fact that he was hated by idiots.It is this theme that runs throughout Lottman's wonderful biography, and it also seems to describe to an extent Lottman's own experience.

For nearly the last quarter of Camus's short life, he lived in disfavor amongst the Paris literati.And for what?Because he, virtually alone amongst French intellectuals, recognized early on the horror that was the true nature of the regime of Joseph Stalin(socialism being virtually an article of faith with the likes of Sartre and others in France at the time).

Lottman himself seems to have had a rather similar experience in his publication of this book.As he points out in his preface to this second edition, a cottage industry has evolved in France and elsewhere in Camus scholarship and criticism.However, though that body of work is deeply indebted to Lottman's research, his preeminent role is rarely acknowledged.I think this is probably because, like Camus, Lottman is an outsider.Neither man was a French native (Camus was an Algerian of mixed French-Spanish descent, Lottman is an American expatriate living in Paris) and neither is an academic by trade (Camus was a newspaper editor, novelist and a man of the theatre, while Lottman is a journalist).Thus, Lottman has seemed at times as unwelcome amongst the French elite as Camus did himself.Again the irony is too much; Lottman has received comparatively little recognition even though he himself is an extremely important cornerstone of current Camus research.

Anyway, this book for whatever reason has received little more attention here in the United States than it has gotten anywhere else, and I think that is a shame.It is a wonderful, readable book.Most importantly, it is non-judgmental and it is very deferential.By that I mean that Lottman nowehere preaches to us how we should understand Camus; as he himself says, the essence of an artist is not in his biography, but in his works. It is long, but has only that level of detail befitting an intellectual biography of this caliber.

For anyone who really wants to understand Camus's literature, a thorough understanding of his life--like Lottman's--is priceless.

Very thorough, but gets bogged down with detail
Although an accomplished and thorough book, it sometimes get bogged down in detail. However, it is a very carefully compiled and analytical book. Good selection of pictures and details of others artists in Camus' life. Ienjoyed it greatly. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Good Read
I acquired The Stranger with no background knowledge of the book or the author. Although at times it is apparent that the book wasn't written originally in English, noticeable mainly through lack of sentence variation, The Stranger is very interesting and tells an intriguing story. A must-read for all Camus fans! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great!
The product arrived in a timely manner and in good condition. I will remember this vendor for my future purchases. ... Read more

Product Description
Condamn?? ?? mort, Meursault. Sur une plage alg??rienne, il a tu?? un Arabe. ?? cause du soleil, dira-t-il, parce qu'il faisait chaud. On n'en tirera rien d'autre. Rien ne le fera plus r??agir : ni l'annonce de sa condamnation, ni la mort de sa m??re, ni les paroles du pr??tre avant la fin. Comme si, sur cette plage, il avait soudain eu la r??v??lation de l'universelle ??quivalence du tout et du rien. La conscience de n'??tre sur la terre qu'en sursis, d'une mort qui, quoi qu'il arrive, arrivera, sans espoir de salut. Et comment ??tre autre chose qu'indiff??rent ?? tout apr??s ??a ? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Vocabulary surprise
I don't know if I just didn't read this in the description when I bought the book, but when I opened it up this evening I found-to my surprise-that there is a list in the back of the book with the verbs used in the text. My French skills are sufficient for most things, but I have to admit that the presence of that reference material is comforting.

Other than that, the book arrived in great shape, just as expected.

It has changed my life forever
When I had to study L'Etranger for my school exams, I at first greeted itwith mild distaste - that is, until I got to know Mersault.This leadcharacter made you want to strangle him and protect him from society at thesame time.He truly illustrated the absurdity of life and the hypocrisy inwhich we all take part.I LOVE THIS BOOK!!I have read it no less thanten times and as soon as I start University next month guess what's goingto be the first book I borrow from the library?!? P.S.If anyone out therewants to send me a free copy of the book (in FRENCH of course) please feeldo so!! ... Read more

Product Description
In the early 1950's, Albert Camus, the renowned existentialist and Nobel prize-winner, visited the American Church in Paris to hear the music of the famous organist Marcel Dupre. What he found was an unexpected friend--Howard Mumma, a Methodist minister from Ohio who was serving as a guest preacher. Intrigued by Mumma's philosophy and theology based on a living faith in a higher power, Camus invited Mumma to lunch and thus a surprising friendship was formed.

Over the next several years, through a series of profound conversations with Howard Mumma, Camus explored the Christian faith. These discussions, as recalled by Mumma in the first part of this book, offer a deeply personal side of Camus not seen by the public eye. In the second part, Mumma shares personal glimpses of the people and experiences that had a profound influence on his own life enabling him to understand what Camus was facing in his personal life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

This should have been two books
On the portion of this book related to Camus:

I have read everything translated into English of Camus I could find, except for Christianity and Neoplatonism, which is on my list.

I picked up the Mumma book because I saw Camus' face on the cover, and was intrigued by the idea - I had the desire to read dialogues between these two minds.

Mumma's goal here is not dialogue, it is at the farthest stretch a confession of his failure, and a presentation of what were his arguments to an intelligent, thinking non-Christian man about Christianity and the Bible.

He says very early on that he failed Camus, but points most directly to his stance on not baptizing him and Camus 'suicide', as he explains it.

Where he fails Camus is much more devious - Camus was not ignorant of religion, Christianity, the saints, etc. - the title of aforementioned Christianity and Neoplatonism should illustrate that pretty fully.The Mumma book is a record, not of dialogues between him and Camus, but of the things Mumma said in an attempt at a celebrity conversion.It there had been real dialogue, I wouldn't use 'celebrity conversion' as the derogatory phrase I intend it to be.Camus certainly asked 'simplistic' questions, because he wanted to know where the man stood.Camus' own words, thoughts, and ideas regarding the matter were however truncated - either by a very polite and non-confrontational Camus, or by a minister who kept no record of it.Camus' words were recorded only in as much as he agreed with Mumma.

Judge for yourself by this singular passage - it speaks of things the minister wanted to be true about Camus but could not know, based on the assumption that joy isn't possible without an attempt to know Christ:

"Here he sat before me, head lowered.The depressed look in his eyes was accented by the little pouches of skin under each one.Despite all of his brilliant success and the fame as a writer, sadness remained his dominant emotion.I wondered what he thought as he sat there.How did he think that I, a guest minister from America, could possibly help him?How could I help him find the answers for which he was ardently searching? As I watched him, I realized that his was more than intellectual curiosity.He wanted more than just a comprehension of faith.He wanted to experience this faith and have it act in his own life."

I find it quite possible that the 'depressed look' and 'little pouches' might have reflected, instead of a desire for an experience of living faith, a desire for a cure for tuberculosis.

This is the tone of the book - at least the portion on Camus.It is a minister's projection of his own definitions and explanations onto a mind I'm not convinced he understood.Judging from the conversations, it certainly doesn't seem like the minister was insterested in asking any questions of his own - he already had his own answers.

I will qualify this in one way, however - in reading Mumma's views on the Bible and Christianity, I think he offers a much more ecumenically conciliatory point of departure than what passes for 'True Christianity' in this country.Special pleading and self-righteousness, it is my hope, will be the death of religions one day.However, had religion in the past 50 years followed the ideas and types of ideas of people like Mumma, our world would be devoid of its everpresent fundamentalism.

On the rest of this book:

I find it a shame, after completing the other section of the book, that these were not separate volumes.I, like others reviewers here, find Mumma's presentation of a nearly converted Camus very suspect.I think a lot of revelation can be gleaned from Camus' desire for a personal, private baptism - this was a friend, and he wanted to strengthen that friendship.I feel the same way towards my Christian friends. On the other hand, the rest of the book is much more interesting, and in fact I could have read a much longer version of what was offered there.Again, it seems as if the first section was his confession.

Too Many Unanswered Questions
It's a matter of record that Albert Camus wrote his Master's thesis on "Christian Metaphysics and Neo-Platonism: Plotinus and Saint Augustine" under the supervision of a professor, Jean Grenier, who was something of an expert on Eastern religions. Considering all his study, considering The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, all else that he wrote, is it possible that Albert Camus could have been as naive as Howard Mumma portrays him? The thrust of the entire narrative seems to have been that Camus came to an American Protestant minister looking for something he had never found before in religion, and found it in, of all places, a Protestant translation of the Bible--as if he had been completely unfamiliar beforehand with its stories and lessons. We may never know the entire truth, but the rehashing of the precepts of the Protestant myth of "sola Scriptura" is so pronounced herein that somehow this book seems to have the taste of the same sort of pious fiction that gave us Voltaire's supposed deathbed horrors.

very, very suspect
i am not quite an encyclopedia entry on Camus, but I am very VERY suspicious of this account by Howard Mumma.this man basically claims that Camus had most decidedly chosen to become a Christian just prior to his death.he also asserts that Camus committed suicide.as an interested reader, does this not strike you as odd?if this is one man's attempt to disgrace the reputation of Camus - a "man and a thinker" - for the sake of political gain...shame shame SHAME ON YOU!if not, well, i apologize for calling you a filthy liar.

Flawed and Beautiful
Mumma in the foreword acknowledges his bias and inaccuracy (he wrote the book almost 40 years after Camus' death, and was around 90 at its publishing).One cannot take the book in a 100% literal fashion - there are clear victims of inaccuracy in the text.However, the story as a whole is an excellent narrative of the existential struggle between the two extremes of Jean-Paul Sartre's thoughts and Mumma's Christianity, with Albert Camus' frustration with the universe straddling the chasm.

On another note, it is impossible to verify the book, Mumma notes that Camus did not want to be identified with a Methodist "priest".In the text, when speaking over dinner, Camus shuns any and all publicity.It is clear that these conversations were never intended to be public - and Camus and his biographers did not mention it.

biased
While interesting for anecdotal pieces on Camus himself, Mr. Mumma is, however, biased & blinded by his religious beliefs and misunderstands Camus (not to mention that one wonders if some of the memories themselves are not... biased...). Certainly not a major addition to the body of intellectual studies related to Camus... ... Read more

Product Description
From 1935 until his death, Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks to sketch out ideas for future works, record snatches of conversations and excerpts from books he was reading, and jot down his reflections on death and the horror of war, his feelings about women and loneliness and art, and his appreciations for the Algerian sun and sea. These three volumes, now available together for the first time in paperback, include all entries made from the time when Camus was still completely unknown in Europe, until he was killed in an automobile accident in 1960, at the height of his creative powers. ... Read more

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"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."

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Customer Reviews (13)

Extraordinary
I have loved Camus's work since I discovered it--as a teacher--in my twenties. Since then I have read nearly everything I could find, including several biographies. For much of a forty year teaching career I attempted to "teach" Camus and, as is always the case, learned more through those efforts than I ever would have "only" as a reader.And each time I tried to explain to my students why Camus was a man who mattered, my sadness and frustration at his premature death increased.

I wish Elizabeth Hawes had written Camus, A Romance long ago, not only so that my students might have read and discussed the book with me, but because the book brings the man to life in a way that no ordinary biography could. I relished every page (as I suspect Hawes relished writing every page) because for the first time I had a sense of the kind of person Camus was and what his life was like in the times in which he lived and wrote.

I recommend this thorough and extraordinary book.

Engaging Biography that Examines Camus's Hold on his Readers
Many biographies are based on the "more is more" principle, with few details too trivial or associations too marginal to merit exclusion. This often makes biographies unappealing to readers like me, who read them to learn what affected a person as he or she underwent important experiences or--in the case of Albert Camus--produced great books. Call me superficial, if you will. But I like a concise biography that illuminates, not a data dump.

As a result, I thought CAMUS, A ROMANCE was a terrific book. You see, this year I've read THE STRANGER, THE PLAGUE, and THE FALL and I was interested to learn something, but not everything, about the artist who produced such amazing work. For example, how did Camus's experiences affect such themes in THE STRANGER as North Africa, the sea, and the gentle indifference of nature? What are the connections between Camus's TB, the Nazi occupation of France, and THE PLAGUE? And, what emotional forces contributed to the perplexing THE FALL? Well, CAMUS, A ROMANCE addresses these and other questions that might occur to readers of these novels. The artist, though sui generis, didn't come from nowhere.

In providing this information, Elizabeth Hawes takes a somewhat unusual approach to her biography. Instead of functioning as a detached narrator who gathers, organizes, and interprets information, she admits to being profoundly affected by Camus and his work. Thus, the second subject of her book is the mystery of her interest in Camus. She wants to know, in other words, why the man and his work are so meaningful to her. While Hawes actually reveals little about herself (she likes dogs, she has a summer house near the ocean), she does put front-and-center the highly personal relationship that readers develop with writers who affect them. In this case, Hawes describes herself as feeling, at times, like Camus's wife or sister, as well as a reader and student. Ultimately, she ends up in the right place, where she considers Camus her friend.

CAMUS, A ROMANCE is not only about Camus's books and the grip they exert on many imaginations. While not going into unnecessary detail, Hawes also discusses the pied noir in Algeria, intellectual life in post-war France, the famous exchange with Sartre following the publication of THE REBEL, Camus's writer's block, the Algerian War, Camus's Nobel Prize, and so on. But this information exists to illuminate the man and his work, which always has a serious moral dimension. Data doesn't dominate.

Even so, I would have cut the paragraph where Hawes relates her most recent dream of Camus. "...he was full of ordinary life. I had joined him walking down a crowded city street, and as we duck around people trying to keep abreast of each other, we laughed..." Regardless, recommended.

A delightful and vibrant book
"Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will." - Goethe

One of Algeria's greatest sons, the late Albert Camus, is back where he rightfully belongs--center stage! Thanks to Elizabeth Hawes' delightful and vibrant book, "Camus, A Romance," and Robert Zaretsky's scholarly and insightful tome, "Albert Camus: Elements of a Life." Albert Camus: Elements of a Life Camus, a talented writer and philosopher, has again risen from the literary ashes. His clarion call for "limits" in the pursuit of otherwise laudable causes; and for truth-telling in the realm of political injustice and social inequities, is as relevant today, as it was during his turbulent lifetime.

Camus was a French-Algerian. He was born in 1913, and raised in the city of Algiers, in a run-down neighborhood. His father, whose ancestral roots were French, was killed fighting in WWI for France against the Germans; while his mother, of Spanish stock, was half-deaf, uneducated and rarely spoke. Is the latter, the origin of the importance of "silence" in Camus' persona? Zaretsky thinks it played a relevant part and I agree with him.

Algeria, in Camus' days, was a French colony, although its Arab population, was in the majority. Life was hard for the budding writer and for his family, but for many of his Arab contemporaries,discrimination, starvation and illiteracy were often their lot.

When I was in high school, at Calvert Hall, a Christian Brother institution, in downtown Baltimore, I remember mostly counting the bricks on a wall located across the street, I was so terribly bored! One of the exceptions was in my "literature" class with Brother Gregory at the the helm. He truly loved what he was doing and it showed. When he read something aloud from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens or Washington Irving, the room lit up for me. Brother Gregory, bless his memory, was an inspiring teacher.

Enter into Camus' life, one Louis Germain. He was an elementary school teacher. Hawes labeled him as Camus' "first surrogate father." Both authors detailed Germain's importance to Camus' eventual career and to his intellectual development as a philosopher. Not only his mentor, Germain became Camus' life long friend and trusted advisor. He helped get him into the "lychee," and later accepted at the University of Algiers.

After graduating from the university, in 1937, Camus became a reporter. In 1939, he documented a famine in the mountainous area of Kabylia, Algeria, not too far from its capital city. His damning report for the "Alger-Republicain" newspaper, was entitled, "Misery in Kabylia." Camus' editor was Pascal Pia, another mentor and significant figure in his success as a literary icon.

Both biographies highlighted incidents such as the above in Camus' experiences. Why? They seemed to have shaped, and, in some cases, reaffirmed, his political and philosophical views. Seeing first hand the evil effects of French colonialism, and the world's indifference to it, left an indelible mark on the psyche of Camus. Later, that influence would be revealed in his books, like: "The Rebel," "The Fall," "The Plague," and "The Myth of Sisyphus."

Camus championed the notion of the "absurd" in his writings. The novel, "The Stranger," his first acclaimed work of art, which catapulted him to fame, is probably the most cogent example of what exactly that concept meant to him. This made Camus' death in an automobile accident, in 1960, even more poignant.

Hawes described Camus' fate of dying in a car crash, "the ultimate absurdity for the man who named the absurd. [He] had in his pocket a round-trip ticket travel by train with his family, but he had been persuaded at the last moment to drive to Paris." The driver was speeding, the car went off the road, striking one tree and then another. The impact broke "Camus' neck," and killed him.

One of Zaretsky's book best strength is how he takes "The Stranger," and the other major literary efforts of Camus, and brilliantly dissects them for the reader. While doing so, he lets you know exactly what was going on in Camus' life at the time each of them were written. For example, when "The Stranger" was published, in 1942, WWII was raging in Europe, and huge parts of France were occupied by the German Army. Camus joined the "French Resistance" and was also the editor of its legendary news organ, "Combat." He was then only 29 years old.

Nevertheless, Camus remained an "outsider" in France, as both Hawes and Zaretsky showed. He was an "outsider" to humanity itself, also. Why? He'd contracted a killer disease--tuberculosis!

Camus' experience of French Algeria, where the Arab is the "other," also impacts his views. The themes: "outsider," "the other," and "separate," runs through Camus' thoughts and are reflected in many of his novels, essays and plays.

Zaretsky sees this, particularly, in Camus' short story, "The Guest." It was published, in 1957, only months after he won the "Nobel Prize" for literature, and around the same time that he hadbriefly addressed the horrific events then raging in Algeria. Nationalists were violently responding to the French heel on their neck. That conflict, where some of the male victims had their "genitals cut off" and stuffed in their mouths, and "women's breasts were sliced off," by the enflamed nationalists, lasted from 1954 to 1962. Tens of thousands of "Arabs and Berbers were killed" in retaliation by the French military. Zaretsky said the slaughters, on both sides, were perpetrated, "in a grisly fashion."

With respect to "The Guest," Zaretsky wrote: "Yet Daru [the protagonist of the story and a French Algerian] discovers he is also a `stranger' in what he always believed to be is own land. He had spent his life feeling like an `outsider' anywhere but in Algeria but is now also `exiled' from his native land. And awful truth dawns on Daru: the historical, cultural, and linguistic division between the `pied noirs' [the settler class of which Camus belonged] and the Arabs [the indigenous people]--both of whom are simultaneously hosts and guests to each other--is too great to bridge."

Getting back to Hawes. What I loved about her chronicle of Camus is how she gets so very personal, indeed, intimate, about his life. Her book is, in a real sense, about her love affair, her "crush" on a man, that she only knows from a distance--from his writings.

Hawes' book is passionate, enlightening and terrific fun to read. She even tracked down Camus' surviving children, Catherine and Jean, and interviewed them about their father. Hawes ended her ode to Camus--visiting his grave, at Lourmarin cemetery--not far from his last home, in France. I say: Take Hawes' book with you to the beach for a read this summer. You won't regret it.

There is much more in both of these fine books: Such as the many writers that influenced Camus' craft, namely: Saint Augustine, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Balzac, Synge, Mann, along with the Greek Tragedies; the fact that Camus' first wife was a drug addict; his love of soccer and his womanizing; Camus' visit to New York City; his love of acting, directing and the theatre; his brief membership in the Communist Party; Camus' views on the Hungarian Revolution; his take on the bloody dictator Josef Stalin, the Soviet Labor Camps and the Purges; and of course, Camus' earthshaking break with another literary titan--Jean-Paul Sartre.

It is on this controversial subject, where Zaretsky shines again. I think it's the professor in him. During the frantic days of the "half-liberated, half-occupied Paris," Sartre was assigned the "task of protecting the vacated "Comedie Francaise." When Camus went there, he found Sartre, "napping," and jokingly cracked to him: "You've placed your seat in the direction of history."

In 1952, the two clashed openly over a scathing review of Camus' book, "The Rebel," which appeared in, "Les Temps Modernes," a magazine controlled by Sartre. This was also after Sartre had made it clear that he was "siding with" the Stalinists. (2) Camus' response to the review went directly to Sartre himself.

Zaretsky quoted from Camus' famous letter: "I am growing tired of seeing myself, and especially of seeing veteran militants who `never ran from struggles' in their own times, receive countless lessons in effectiveness from critics who have done nothing more than point their `seats in the direction of history.'"

Finally, I submit that both Hawes and Zaretsky deserve credit for adding to our knowledge of Camus' legacy, and to his importance to our perilous times. Let's face it, we live in an era where screwball ideologues are running amuck. Dissenting voices can find no better model for taking on these crazed warmongersthan looking to Camus--one of humanity's finest moralists.

An interesting exercise that doesn't quite come off
Elizabeth Hawes was in college when she fell in love with Albert Camus. By her senior year, she was writing an honors thesis about him and planning overseas study where she hoped to meet her idol. But on January 4, 1960, the French writer - who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature just three years before, at age 43 - died in a car accident.

Nearly 40 years later, Hawes has authored what her publisher terms a biography-memoir: it charts her search for, and feelings about, Camus as well as the arc of his life. She describes the places she visited, the archives she sifted, the people she talked with who had known Camus (including his daughter, son, and an actual lover or two). She also describes how she feels about the trek, how her discoveries affect her view of Camus, how well the search is going.

The chapters are arranged partly in chronology and partly by topic (Camus's writing and resistance work during the war, the women in his life, the friendship with and rancorous estrangement from Sartre, his anguish over the bloody colonial struggle in his native Algeria).

It's tempting to say there's a little too much of Hawes in the book and not enough of Camus, but that's not quite right. It would be more accurate to say there's not enough of her to get us firmly and securely to him. Of course Hawes is concerned not to get in the way of her subject, but if we're going to spend time with her at all, we need to know enough about her to be able to trust her assertions.

Otherwise, remarks such as "His voice ... is almost audible," "these documents seem invaluable for their revelations, and the words ring true," and "this made him seem familiar, like someone I actually had once known" come to sound like protesting too much - telling us rather than showing.

She includes notes by Blanche Knopf, Camus's American publisher's rep, about finding a suitable dress for the Nobel ceremony and declares that such small details are "strangely satisfying." This sort of thing may ring true in a fan - each of us has silly obsessions with celebrities, whether they're T.S. Eliot or Michael Jackson - but it's not necessarily helpful in a biographer. If we don't already admire Camus, it's harder to feel with Hawes from scratch, no matter how well she writes.

Now and then, the biographer acknowledges the possible futility of her labors: "But I was not able to summon forth any more of the life that had gone on in that small studio than I had sitting at my desk in Manhattan."

This book would make an adequate introduction to Camus for a reader who knows nothing about him, but those who have read his books or an earlier biography (e.g., Herbert Lottman's or Olivier Todd's) might find it a little thin and precious.

Adolescent Love
The book is as much about the author as it is about Camus and if this was your first introduction to the non-fictional Camus you would want to go further, much further. But if you had read other biographies this book would be at best redundant and at worst frustrating since so much time is spent on the author's love for her subject. Elizabeth Hawe's romance never rises about an adolescent obsession and she unfortunately fails to have the humor to see it in that light. The too brief section that feature interviews with Camus' son, daughter and lover fail to present us with the living Camus. It is ironic that on the last pages of her memoir Hawes speaks to Robert Gallinard on the seeming failure of most biographies on Camus. "...it as a sense of Camus the charmer. It was the way he walked, the way he danced, the way he liked to kick a pebble down the street." Well Hawes does describe the way he walked and danced but the prose is prosaic. ... Read more