The First Man

August 5, 1996
Camus was working on this novel, an autobiographical coming-of-age story, when he died in 1960.

October 8, 2018
Fragments by Camus are tenderly knitted together by translator Bloom and cartoonist Fernandez (The Stranger) into an episodic autobiographical ramble that intrigues at times but falls well short of the War and Peace–style epic Camus planned. Only 144 pages of the unfinished work were discovered in the car wreck that killed Camus in 1960. The author’s stand-in is Jacques Cormery, an Algerian-born writer who is the toast of 1957 Parisian literary society. A superb brooder, drawn by Fernandez with a dashingly Gallic cinematic appeal, Jacques is torn between worlds (“the Mediterranean separates two universes inside of me”). While successful in France, he remains the pugnacious colonial outsider (“it’s the Algerian in me they don’t like”). His flurry of childhood memories, from swimming to hunting and picnicking, are mixed with ruminations on the nature of the homeland he hates to love—dissecting the knotted relationship of French colonials to Algerian Arabs, people “close together and far apart.” Too much of this is wound up in Jacques’s cyclical guilt over his poor, illiterate mother, about whom he unloads on his painfully acquiescent lover. While Fernandez’s colors and architectural attention evokes the spare, sun-scorched Mediterranean setting, his inexpressive faces don’t help enliven an already stiff narrative. Too obviously incomplete, this moody adaptation doesn’t have the philosophical power of Camus’s better fiction.