Albert Camus

Synopsis of Albert Camus

This is an enormously engaging, vibrant, and richly researched biography of Albert Camus, written by the French writer and journalist Olivier Todd. It draws on personal correspondence, notebooks, and public records never before tapped, as well as interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, writers, mentors, and lovers. Todd shows us a Camus who struggled all his life with irreconcilable conflicts: between his loyalty to family and his passionate nature, between the call to political action and the integrity of his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten people, the poor whites. A very private man, Camus could be charming and prickly, sincere and theatrical, genuinely humble, but full of great ambition. Todd paints a vivid picture of the time and place that shaped Camus: his impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, the sea and the sun and the hot sands that he so loved (he would always feel an exile elsewhere), and the educational system that nurtured him. We see the forces that lured him into communism and his attraction to the theater and journalism as outlets for his creativity. The Paris to which Camus was inevitably drawn is one that Todd knows intimately, and he brings to life the war years, the underground activities in which Camus was involved during the Occupation and the bitter postwar period, as well as the intrigues of the French literati who embraced Camus after the publication of his first novel, L'Etranger. Todd is also keenly attuned to the French intellectual climate, and as he takes the measure of Camus as a successful novelist, journalist, playwright and director, literary editor, philosopher, he also reveals the temperament in the writer that increasingly isolated him and crippled his reputation in the years before his death and for a long time after. He shows us the solitary man behind the mask, debilitated by continuing bouts of tuberculosis, constantly drawn to irresistible women, and deeply troubled by his political conflicts with the reigning French intellectuals, particularly by the vitriol of his former friend Sartre over the Algerian conflict. Filled with sharp observations and sparkling with telling details, here is a wonderfully human portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning writer, who died at the age of 46 and who remains one of the most influential literary figures of our time.