Synopses & Reviews
Elizabeth Hawes's passionate pursuit of Camus began with her college thesis. A biography-memoir,
Camus, A Romance reveals the man behind the famous name: the French-Algerian of humble birth and Mediterranean passions; the TB-stricken exile who edited the World War II resistance newspaper
Combat; the pied noir in anguish over the Algerian War; the Don Juan who loved a multitude of women; the writer in search of a truer voice.
These form only the barest outlines of the rich tapestry of Camus's life, which Elizabeth Hawes chronicles alongside her own experience following in his footsteps, meeting his friends and family, and trying to enter his solitude.
Review
"Much pleasure and illumination reside in this unusually vivid biography and graceful memoir of literary communion." Booklist
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"[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." Library Journal
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"[L]ucid, sympathetic insights....We get a bit too much of Hawes in her frankly confessional narrative, but perhaps that's what she needed to do to give us so much of Camus with such perceptiveness and warmth." Los Angeles Times
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"A whimsical sojourn into the life of Nobel-winning French 'writer of conscience.'...Heartfelt but patchy." Kirkus Reviews
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"[I]t's thrilling to see that precisely such a shadow biography has now been written, not about Lispector but about another great writer, Albert Camus. It isn't often that I read a book with which I have as much personal affinity as I did with Elizabeth Hawes's Camus, A Romance...which tells of her lifelong fascination with the Algerian, and which reads as if she has filled out all the stories lurking in the acknowledgments section." Benjamin Moser, Harper's Magazine (read the entire )