"I've never seen the light in me to finish. But I have always followed, instinctively, an invisible star ... Mine is an anarchy, disorder awful. Create cost me a thousand deaths because it is an order and that my whole being refuses to order. But I would die without him scattered. " Since I opened Plague , the year I was fourteen, like Albert Camus. I do not pretend to have pierced the secrets of his thought, be a graduate MSc existentialism, or really know the man ... But it is a day into my heart and is no longer released. He is among those who made me want to be my turn a writer, and made modest at the same time. In recent months, Much has been said of Camus, his commitments, his quarrel with Sartre, her passion for theater ... but for me it is primarily an author who has created characters of flesh and blood, strong stories and universal. When I think of him I see a man standing in the shade of blinding sunlight, cigarette in hand, watching live and tremble Meursault Tarrou Clamence and others, all these characters he has children and which has since become part of us. So it's the writer I'll talk to you.
"I always thought that all the characters of a writer represented one of his temptations," said Camus in an interview in 1957, where he came to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize. All
. Meursault, first, the man who confronts his destiny almost without a word, buried her mother without crying, this "outsider" who disturbs others by his apparent indifference to life, which refuses to kneel, lie. L'Etranger is a novel deeply endearing despite its lapidary form, naked, offering as little catch his characters, and exploding in its last quarter, showing a man caught in the nets of justice arbitrary and theatrical, a man judged not on his real crime, but the crime of having not play the social game that would have saved his head.
Meursault is this stranger who refuses to call and reassure others by white lies, exaggerating his feelings, but faces his destiny as he embraces life, even in its absurd finality, the magnet a strong love and despair. "For me to this world I will not lie or be told lies " writes Camus in Marriage . In contrast, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the judge-penitent Fall is a great actor, has mastered the art of social lie. This judge is burning to confess to the stranger he has found a shady bar in Amsterdam, who did not have enough words to unmask the deception on which he built his life, not looking for true atonement. Quite the contrary. If he bares no thank you but with subtlety, it has not been chosen at random caller:
"We rarely confide in those who are better than us. We fuirions rather their society. Most often, however, we confess to those who are like us and share our weaknesses. We do not want to correct us, to be improved: it would first that we were considered failures. We just want to be pitied and encouraged in our path. "
If Clamence chose this man crossing could be the reader, to hand him a mirror grinding in which he can finally confront him who believes himself innocent. Judge-penitent, penitent judge and in turn, and both, like a Janus-faced sinister equally chilling, Clamence is probably the darkest character of Camus, his double grinning. With the Fall , we are thrown into the back of the human comedy as Dante's guide next to Hell, fascinated and plagued by the repulsion devouring this short novel with its bitterness. 
is a laugh in the middle of the night that unmasks the imposter Clamence in his own eyes, but her laughter to him that the player wins after having closed the book, ironic and haunting. The laughter of one who, under the guise of a confession, just flush out all these little arrangements with ourselves that allow us to love us more conveniently.
Meursault and Clamence two sides of the inverted human being, two temptations Camus. Do not play the game, or play too well. In both cases, the bottom one is alone in front of you. A stranger. But where Meursault is moving towards peace with death the world and its absurdity, at peace with itself, Clamence wanders like a specter that will never find rest.
ago Camus will understand without judging, or as little as possible. This attitude could only earn him the enmity, as most of us do not consider to be right without others are wrong. When we refuse to judge, exclude, condemn to death, it is condemned never to be accepted by any society. Camus has always had the courage. And if it is a novel that expresses the desire to understand the other, all the others, it is Plague . For me, it's with the First Man , the most disturbing novel of Camus, a song of brotherhood and faith in man. The story is simple: the Plague, grinning ghost of a bygone era, fell on the city of Oran, in general incredulity.
A handful of men will find themselves in the walled city tainted and delivered to their dilemma: stay or go, fight or call. In Plague , we meet Dr. Rieux who fight against death and think "the key is to do its job . Then Tarrou, mysterious character who observes the city and its convulsions before entering into resistance and for which no cause can never justify the killing a man . Great Hall of the employee, has "the courage of his good feelings" and endless rewrites the first sentence of his novel as it is difficult to find the right words to say emotion. Rambert, a journalist lover, thinks only join the woman he is separated and defends his right to happiness meet the requirements of "public service". There is also Paneloux, the priest who wants to see in the Plague punishment purifier, and J. Otto, whose certainties waver with the death of her little boy. Finally Cottard, liqueurs and wine merchant who thrives Plague, and it is happier. If the characters confront their opinions and commitments, the novel does not judge anyone. Probably because these characters symbolize all the temptations of man in chaos in the world, the decline in active resistance. They could obviously wasting their time hating and exclusive. "No" thought the doctor, love or die together, there is no other resource. "
metaphor for Nazism and the Occupation, Plague speak also and especially the pain of believing himself free and discover that it is not, we can, day Suddenly, find themselves separated of everything we love and reduced to the condition of "exile" at home. Does remain, then, that fraternity and rebellion to make his life worth living. But as
Abroad will treasure him the secret of what to do engage until the very end, Albert Camus wait for years before writing his novel's most intimate The First Man .
is a novel worth reading, even if it is incomplete, because it reveals a writer reconciled with his original injury, which comes in the footsteps of what has wrought: the absence his father, the silent love of his mother, a school that has literally saved from misery, love of land, an Algerian people still at the heart of his thinking. The hero, Jacques Cormery, realizes the grave of his father that he is now older than the father he can not find nothing, no memory, except that he died at the Battle of the Marne and here lies beneath this stone engraved:
is a laugh in the middle of the night that unmasks the imposter Clamence in his own eyes, but her laughter to him that the player wins after having closed the book, ironic and haunting. The laughter of one who, under the guise of a confession, just flush out all these little arrangements with ourselves that allow us to love us more conveniently. Meursault and Clamence two sides of the inverted human being, two temptations Camus. Do not play the game, or play too well. In both cases, the bottom one is alone in front of you. A stranger. But where Meursault is moving towards peace with death the world and its absurdity, at peace with itself, Clamence wanders like a specter that will never find rest.
ago Camus will understand without judging, or as little as possible. This attitude could only earn him the enmity, as most of us do not consider to be right without others are wrong. When we refuse to judge, exclude, condemn to death, it is condemned never to be accepted by any society. Camus has always had the courage. And if it is a novel that expresses the desire to understand the other, all the others, it is Plague . For me, it's with the First Man , the most disturbing novel of Camus, a song of brotherhood and faith in man. The story is simple: the Plague, grinning ghost of a bygone era, fell on the city of Oran, in general incredulity.
A handful of men will find themselves in the walled city tainted and delivered to their dilemma: stay or go, fight or call. In Plague , we meet Dr. Rieux who fight against death and think "the key is to do its job . Then Tarrou, mysterious character who observes the city and its convulsions before entering into resistance and for which no cause can never justify the killing a man . Great Hall of the employee, has "the courage of his good feelings" and endless rewrites the first sentence of his novel as it is difficult to find the right words to say emotion. Rambert, a journalist lover, thinks only join the woman he is separated and defends his right to happiness meet the requirements of "public service". There is also Paneloux, the priest who wants to see in the Plague punishment purifier, and J. Otto, whose certainties waver with the death of her little boy. Finally Cottard, liqueurs and wine merchant who thrives Plague, and it is happier. If the characters confront their opinions and commitments, the novel does not judge anyone. Probably because these characters symbolize all the temptations of man in chaos in the world, the decline in active resistance. They could obviously wasting their time hating and exclusive. "No" thought the doctor, love or die together, there is no other resource. " metaphor for Nazism and the Occupation, Plague speak also and especially the pain of believing himself free and discover that it is not, we can, day Suddenly, find themselves separated of everything we love and reduced to the condition of "exile" at home. Does remain, then, that fraternity and rebellion to make his life worth living. But as
Abroad will treasure him the secret of what to do engage until the very end, Albert Camus wait for years before writing his novel's most intimate The First Man .
is a novel worth reading, even if it is incomplete, because it reveals a writer reconciled with his original injury, which comes in the footsteps of what has wrought: the absence his father, the silent love of his mother, a school that has literally saved from misery, love of land, an Algerian people still at the heart of his thinking. The hero, Jacques Cormery, realizes the grave of his father that he is now older than the father he can not find nothing, no memory, except that he died at the Battle of the Marne and here lies beneath this stone engraved: "And the flood of tenderness and pity of a sudden it came to fill the heart was not the movement of soul that carries the memory of the son to the father disappeared, but compassion upset a man does to the child feels unjustly murdered - something here is not in the natural order and, indeed, there was no order but only madness and chaos where the son was older than the father. Following the time itself is shattered around him motionless, between the graves that he saw more, and years stopped arrange themselves along the great river that flows toward its end. They were only crash, surf and eddies where Jacques Cormery struggling now grappling with the anguish and pity. "
The First Man is dedicated to his mother who does will ever read because it does not read. The mother, being a fictional character, can be shared like a secret treasure entrusted to her maternal love pens in his life and the silences missed it. Of all the characters of Camus is probably one of the most beautiful.
And if you want to learn more about one of the most endearing writers of the twentieth century, I invite you to dive into his books published by Gallimard. Both workbooks and diaries, they draw a deeply human Camus, beset by doubt, anxious but also solar and carnal, desperately in love with life, living intensely in their joys and in his sorrows, and who wrote ten years before he died:
"In truth, nobody can die in peace if he has not done everything necessary so that others may live . "
I hope I have given the desire to read or reread.
Gaëlle Nohant
'll also mention the superb portrait of him by his daughter Catherine, Albert Camus: Solitaire and several and a lovely reverie on Jose Lenzini The Last Days of Life Albert Camus , following in his last moments this writer from a world of silent and looks at his silent love for his mother.
If you had asked me who I wanted to be entrusted with this adaptation, I would have said Scorsese and David Lynch. Here I answered before he made my wish! I count the days ... and until February 24, you can read here 
