Camus, a Romance

June 1, 2009
A whimsical sojourn into the life of Nobel-winning French"writer of conscience."

Former New Yorker staff writer Hawes (New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City, 1869-1930, 1993) claims that she feels"a cosmic connection" to Albert Camus (1913–60). The author mostly forgoes literary analysis, focusing instead on what his daily life was like, and how the challenges he faced informed the literature he produced. Passing cursorily over Camus's years in Algeria, primarily for lack of source material, the early chapters are choppy. Extensive quotations from his personal journal are juxtaposed with musings and descriptions of Hawes's trips to France to find"the essence of the French identity." The author then breezily discusses Camus's meteoric rise to fame in Paris as editor of Combat, and the publication of his most enduring book, The Stranger (1942). Though Hawes claims that Camus's editorials were"the talk of the town," she doesn't tell us why. Instead she attempts to capture the atmosphere of postwar France by staying at the Hotel Lutetia and ordering"a dozen oysters and a glass of Sancerre." The narrative picks up when Hawes examines the impact of TB on Camus's life. Providing graphic insights into how the disease both debilitated and motivated him from its onset in his teenage years, Hawes correctly notes how it magnified his sense of exile, of being the outsider. Camus saw himself as having a"high moral purpose," and when he published his nonfiction book The Rebel in 1951, criticizing the tyrannical aspects of revolutions, he invoked the ire of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Parisian pro-Soviet, communist intelligentsia. Hawes provides delicious detail about Sartre's public attack on Camus's character and work, a painful betrayal by his former friend. After a period of shock and writer's block, Camus's rejection motivated him to write The Fall (1956), which earned him a Nobel Prize before his death in a car crash in 1960.

Heartfelt but patchy. For more penetrating insights, see Olivier Todd's Albert Camus: A Life (1997).

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2009
When Nobel prize-winning author Albert Camus died in a car crash outside Paris at the age of 46, the tragic news shook many intellectuals and especially affected young admirers of the French-Algerian author. A young student at the time, Hawes ("New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City, 18691930") became more passionately interested in Camus and ended up writing her college thesis about him. That passion has turned into a "forty-year quest" or "romance" that, while not always constant or conscious, is reflected in this meticulously researched biography/memoir. Following Camus's footsteps through France, North Africa, and America, Hawes meets Camus's friends and family and draws on personal correspondence, public records, and published works to paint a detailed and vivid picture of the time, places, and people that shaped the author's life. The result is an engaging, vibrant, notably passionate and unique biography of the author. Highly recommended for all academic libraries, this should also be strongly considered by public libraries.Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2009
Romance is not commonly used to describe the relationship between a biographer and her subject, but certainly passion is essential to the process. Hawes fell in love with the French Algerian Nobel laureate Albert Camus while in college and dreamed of traveling to France to meet her idol, but Camus perished in a car crash in 1960 at age 46. Although Hawes kept the ember of her ardor glowing, it didnt catch fire until Camus unfinished last novel, The First Man, was published in 1995. Hawes unabashedly personal, adventurously researched, empathic, atmospheric, and analytical portrait of Camus begins with exquisite testimony to the impact a writer can have on a reader. She then sensitively and vividly chronicles Camus materially impoverished but mentally rich boyhood, contraction of tuberculosis at 17, love for his homeland, front-page fame in France, and complicated love life. More intrepidly, she charts the evolution of Camus high moral purpose as a Resistance journalist in occupied France and a novelist intent on truth and justice. Much pleasure and illumination reside in this unusually vivid biography and graceful memoir of literary communion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)