Olivier Todd's biography of Albert Camus matches its subject's depth by portraying the man as well as the moralist. Born in Algeria and raised in poverty by an illiterate mother, Camus never forgot where he came from. He made his name in Nazi-occupied Paris--publicly as the author of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, covertly as a member of the Resistance and editor of its newspaper, Combat--but he longed for the North African sun of his youth. During the years of crisis when Algeria struggled to break free from France, Camus alienated both colonialists and revolutionaries by supporting full equality for Arabs but denouncing terrorism. "I believe in justice," he told an Algerian heckler at a 1957 meeting he addressed in Stockholm after winning the Nobel Prize. "But I will defend my mother before justice." It is this preference for the concrete over the abstract that makes Camus such an appealing thinker. Todd's biography, which offers the most fully human depiction yet, is equally engaging.


From Library Journal
There are very few biographies as meticulously researched as this one by journalist and author Todd (Cruel April, LJ 8/90). In some cases, the research leads to stretches of very tedious reading, but the book's smooth narrative flow mostly prevents that and makes for a rich description of Camus's life in colonial Algiers, wartime Paris, and his relationship with his immediate family, wives, and lovers. Todd's use of personal correspondence, interviews with family members, and previously unused public records reveals a complex man who was a philosopher, novelist, literary editor, and journalist slowly dying of tuberculosis and at odds with fellow French intellectuals over his political beliefs. Set against the historical background of French North Africa, Occupied France, and the postwar Paris literary scene, Camus vividly comes to life almost 40 years after his tragic death in an automobile accident. Recommended for specific collections.-?David Lee Poremba, Detroit P.L.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Wall Street Journal, Eugen Weber
...a lively, richly detailed portrait of this talented, meditative, self-critical, depressive, playful, ribald, vulnerable and unstable man....


The New York Times Book Review, Isabelle de Courtivron
Todd's exhaustive biography, which appeared in France in 1996, resembles American biographies, in that every fact, figure, testament and event is recounted--whether these details have significance or not--more than it does the French model, which tends to romanticize and fictionalize famous lives. This lengthy work has the merit of being comprehensive; for publication here, however, it has been abridged and edited down to 434 pages, from 859 in the French edition.... it leads to a strangely unsatisfactory solution.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Elizabeth Hawes
Albert Camus: A Life is a magnum opus, a prodigiously researched and meticulously detailed reconstruction of the life of a writer who had many voices and wore many masks.... Olivier Todd ... keeps an objective distance and, eschewing psychobiography and hagiography, compiles a straightforward chronological body of evidence that allows a reader to observe Camus in a sort of dailiness, to be present at the formation of his thought and his art.


From Kirkus Reviews
In this penetrating biography, Todd, a French journalist and author, clarifies the greatness of the Nobel Prizewinning author while also pointing out toes of clay. Born into poverty in Algeria, Camus managed, under the tutelage of two dedicated teachers, to educate himself and become one of the leading moral voices of this century. Todd's account traces the development of Camus's mature thought during his editorship of the Resistance paper Combat during WW II and after, in the battles over ``purifying'' the country of Nazi collaborators (``We will maintain freedom, even if it profits those who fought against it,'' he said, opposing summary justice). Todd conveys both Camus's intense appetite for life, his sensuality and vitality--for playing soccer, for the air and sea of his beloved Algeria--his confidence and also his self-doubt, his feeling of entrapment in his marriage and the consequent inability to remain faithful to his devoted but needy wife, Francine. Todd sagely attributes this to the need ``to fight a certain vertigo made up of fear and illness and death''--he suffered from serious, recurrent bouts of tuberculosis. The genesis of his great works, from The Stranger to the unfinished novel, The First Man, the evolution of his ideas on absurdity, revolt, and freedom, are ably explored, as are Camus's often lonely positions among the French intellegentsia--never an ideologue, he was against Stalinist totalitarianism, against Arab terrorism in the struggle for Algerian independence. Todd's writing (or perhaps just its translation) is not notably graceful, and he can be evenhanded almost to a fault in his portrait of Camus; one wishes for a little less dispassion in his concluding remarks on the writer's lasting significance. (Knopf, however, has set a very bad precedent for serious nonfiction by omitting the end notes, which appeared in the French version, from this edition.) Still, this is a satisfying portrait of a man whose ideas on freedom, nationalism, and violence are as necessary today as they were half a century ago. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


The New York Review of Books, John Weightman
Todd has spared no pains in his search for significant details. He has followed Camus's trail in North Africa, in America, and even to Moscow, where the writer's name figures in the Soviet archives. He thanks some two hundred people for answering his questions about the Camus they knew, and for allowing him to quote from their letters or diaries. As a result, it is difficult to imagine that there can ever be a more exhaustive study of Camus's personality and of the relationship between his works and his life.


Book Description
In this vibrant, engaging biography of Albert Camus, the internationally acclaimed author of The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, French writer and journalist Olivier Todd has richly tapped resources never before available-personal correspondence, notebooks, public records--as well as exclusive interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, mentors, and lovers. What emerges is the study of a man caught in conflicts between family loyalties and his own passionate nature, between the call to political action and devotion to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten poor whites. Exploring Camus's impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, his underground activities during the Occupation in Paris, the intrigues of the French literati who embraced him after the publication of his first novel, L'Etranger, Todd uncovers the solitary private man behind the mask of his celebrity. He shows us a writer isolated by his own success, crippled by the charms of women he could not resist, debilitated by the tuberculosis that did not kill him. The auto accident that did adds only to the ironies in the life of this international giant of twentieth-century literature.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Albert Camus has been one of this century's most misunderstood intellectual figures. Lumped in among Sartre and the other existentialists, when in fact he strongly disapproved of their philosophy, and reviled as a tool of French colonialism, when in fact he spent much of his life fighting imperialist oppression, Camus's undeniably important legacy for 20th century literature and thought has been hopelessly confused. In a meticulously documented new biography, "Albert Camus: A Life" (originally published in France in 1996), Olivier Todd attempts to set the record straight, while simultaneously painting a vivid, complex portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and philosopher.

Camus was born in Algeria in 1913 to working-class parents; both his poverty and his status as a pied-noir (a derogatory term of the day for working-class French Algerians) unquestionably influenced his later political thought and writing. His father died in World War I; his mother supported her two children by working as a cleaning woman. Camus won a scholarship to high school and was able to continue his studies at the university level, but not before tuberculosis was diagnosed, when he was 17. This disease, then incurable, provided one of the major ironies of Camus's life: After spending 30 years slowly dying of tuberculosis, he was ultimately killed all at once in an automobile accident, on January 4, 1960.

In between, of course, Camus became a driving force on the French literary intellectual scene. His first publication in France (Camus lived almost exclusively in Algeria prior to World War II) wasthe now-classic L'Étranger (The Stranger), published by Gallimard in 1942. L'Étranger had been one third of a trilogy that Camus hoped to publish simultaneously, but owing to the difficulties of wartime publication—both the pedestrian troubles of acquiring paper and finding a printer as well as the more sticky matter of dealing with the Nazi censors—the other two volumes were delayed. In 1947, however, Camus's place in the French literary and political canons was sealed with the phenomenally successful "La Peste" ("The Plague").

During the summer of 1942, Camus moved to occupied Paris, where he put his previous journalistic experience—he had written for and edited the Alger Républicain and Le Soir Républicain—to work for the French Resistance. Camus became the editor of Combat, an underground Resistance newspaper, writing numerous (though pseudonymous) editorials even after Combat's freedom was granted by the liberation.

These editorials, however, particularly those written after the liberation, reveal the basis for Camus's political conflicts with the French literary elite. Camus had joined the Communist Party in Algeria in 1935, but was purged from the party two years later as a "Trotskyite agitator," having angered party officials over his pro-Algerian-rights stance. And though his work for the Resistance was much in line with the ideology of the French Communist Party during World War II, he broke with the party in January 1945, withdrawing as well from the National Writers Committee over the issue of "purification"—the execution for treason of all Nazi collaborators. Camus felt strongly that justice did need to be served, but felt that what the Communists and the National Writers Committee were promoting was not justice but radical vengeance.

Camus's final political break from the French literary intellectual community was to come just a few years later, over the cause of Algerian nationalism. While Camus had for years fought the colonial oppression of ethnic Algerians, he nonetheless hoped that the country would remain part of the French Republic. Always a pacifist at heart, he particularly opposed the Stalin-supported Front for National Liberation (FLN), and thus drew heated criticism as a tool of the imperialist government. By 1951, Camus was virtually isolated from the rest of the left-wing intelligentsia.

Todd's biography traces Camus's writing life, from his pre-L'Étranger publications through his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1957, alongside the narrative of his political life, in and out of the Communist Party, in and out of favor with the popular front. But Todd does not neglect the dramatic—and often salacious—story of his personal life, from his morphine-addicted first wife, Simone Hié, to the nervous breakdown suffered by his second wife, Francine Faure, to the numerous love affairs that occurred in between—and during—those two marriages. The portrait Todd paints with these three brushes is that of a man living his life to the fullest, while daily confronted with his own mortality.

If there is anything to complain about in "Albert Camus", it would, unfortunately, be Benjamin Ivry's translation, which is artless at best, and leaves the reader slightly too aware that he is reading a translated volume. Nonetheless, Todd's biography of Camus illuminates one of the major forces in the century's literary and intellectual history.—Kathleen Fitzpatrick

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this enormously engaging, vibrant, and richly researched biography of Albert Camus, the French writer and journalist Olivier Todd has drawn 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 to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten people, the poor whites. A vey private man, Camus could be charming and prickly, sincere and theatrical, genuinely humble, yet full of great ambition. The Paris that Camus was inevitably drawn to is one that Todd knows intimately, and he brings alive the war years, the underground activities that Camus was caught up in during the Occupation and the bitter postwar period, as well as the intrigues of the French literati who embraced Camus after his first novel, L'Etranger, was published. Todd is also keenly attuned to the French intellectual climate, and as he takes Camus's measure 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal