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Camus, A Romance by Elizabeth Hawes Find this book in our catalog

Most biographers like and admire their subjects, especially after years of researching the person’s life, even if they assume that their words are unbiased and free from slant. They might insist that, in fact, this is truly a detached look at a person’s life held at arm’s length. Elizabeth Hawes, on the contrary, uses her admiration, indeed, love for Albert Camus to uncover his life for interested readers, in an unabashed and openly sympathetic manner. This is, then, not just a biography of a twentieth-century author, but a story about the biographer’s actual search for that author to whose writings and life she is deeply devoted, a kind of memoir of the Camus and also of Hawes.

In a typically biographical fashion, readers learn of Camus’s early life as a student and author, and later as a member of the Resistance during the Second World War, his subsequent affiliation with radical literary movements, his friendship and eventual ideological and literary split with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, his life-long battle with tuberculosis, his foibles and his strengths in authorship and in his personal life. But readers also see the struggle in which Hawes engages as she tracks down friends and acquaintances to interview, as she travels paths Camus also walked, places where he lived and loved.

Hawes readily admits that her research on this author has drawn her more and more into a wish that she could have met him in his lifetime, talked to him, been his friend. And readers develop similar feelings, experiencing disappointment, for example, when they see how close Hawes comes to meeting or interviewing a close acquaintance of Camus, but misses that chance because the person has passed away only recently or is no longer offering interviews. She embraces for Camus what other biographers might hesitate to admit: a desire to be the subject’s friend. In the end, she recognizes that she and Camus are friends, even if he died when she was a student, before her college research on him could be turned onto a more serious path towards a biography. This is the story, then, of a journey in search of a friend. Along the way, readers see before them Camus’s life uncovered, revealed in a gentle, enlightening, and appreciative way, with respect and love.

Labels: Camus - biography, Elizabeth Hawes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir