Word: camus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...made to live for others. But one really dies only for oneself." The author of this journal entry was 46 and world famous when he was killed in a car crash south of Paris on Jan. 4, 1960. Within this short life, Albert Camus had won the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature and produced a compact body of novels (The Stranger, The Plague), plays (Caligula) and philosophical essays (The Myth of Sisyphus) that both defined and helped create a 20th century temperament: We are by ourselves in an absurd universe, compelled to act but bereft of any reasonable grounds...
...time of his death, Camus was working on a long autobiographical novel, which he called Le Premier Homme (The First Man). Near the scene of the fatal accident, investigators found Camus's mud-stained, accordion-style black briefcase; among its contents were 144 handwritten manuscript pages containing about 80,000 words -- a first version of the first part of his intended work. Camus's widow Francine refused all entreaties to publish the unrevised fragment, but his daughter Catherine, now 48, who inherited her father's estate after her mother's death in 1979, decided that the manuscript would be made...
...Camus is once again intriguing literary Paris. "His feverish voice is throughout," writes critic Francoise Giroud, "a voice that, at times, pierces your heart." In the newsmagazine Le Point, Jacques-Pierre Amette declares that "the voice of Camus, more resonant than ever in its trembling solemnity, addresses itself to today's generation." The book has already run through seven printings and sold more than 130,000 copies. Some 20 foreign publishers are scrambling for translation rights. Which raises a question. Why this excitement over a rough draft of a partial novel by an author who died 34 years ago? Even...
Much of the book's impact may be explained on these grounds alone: Who can resist an unauthorized peek at the inner life of a legend? Le Premier Homme has a confessional feeling, unmediated by any of the distancing ironies and disguises Camus employed in works published during his lifetime. It cannot be known whether he was reaching for the looser and more lush writing style of this narrative or whether he did not live to pare away what he might have considered its excesses. But his hero, Jacques Cormery (the surname of Camus's paternal grandmother), is indistinguishable from...
...born in the French colony of Algeria to barely literate mothers with severe hearing disabilities. Both come to be raised entirely by these largely speechless women because both, scarcely a year old, lose their fathers, killed in World War I during the first Battle of Marne in 1914. Camus writes, in the person of Cormery, "I tried to discover as a child what was right and wrong since no one around could tell me. And now I recognize that everything abandoned me, that I need someone to show me the way, to blame and praise me . . . I need my father...