Olivier Todd

A Life

Albert Camus

Albert Camus is among the most significant French writers of the twentieth century. His novels, THE PLAGUE and THE OUTSIDER, have a timeless power and appeal and are studied all over the world, and his philosophical work has had an enduring influence. Oliver Todd has been authorised by Camus' family to write the definitive life. Opening with his impoverished childhood in Algiers , Todd brings the historical context to life, shedding light on Camus' later agonising conflict between sympathy for the working class Algerians and for the French colonials with a stake in their adopted land. His life pre-sented impossible choices and perpetual struggle: his intimacy with the Gallimard family, despite their collaborationist activities; his involvement in the conflict between Satre and de Beauvoir; his own battles with debilitating bouts of tuberculosis and with the passion-ate, restless nature that would never let him settle. Because Todd understands his subject and his times so well, he brings to this rich, generous biography a rare immediacy and perception, evoking a great writer and his would with memorable force and engaging subtlety

El enorme exito que obtuvo El primer hombre (Andanzas 228), de Albert Camus, publicado en Francia nada menos que treinta y cuatro anos despues de la muerte de su autor, ha sido la prueba innegable de que, en opinion de los lectores, este sigue ocupando un lugar predominante en el Olimpo de las letras. Mucho se ha escrito sobre Camus, pero el prestigioso periodista y escritor frances Olivier Todd, que para esta ocasion se ha convertido en historiador e investigador y que se tomo cuatro largos anos revisando in situ toda clase de archivos jamas consultados b"desde Argelia hasta Moscu pasando por la correspondencia hasta ahora bajo secretob," nos demuestra que aun habia mucho que conocer del gran filosofo, novelista y dramaturgo, Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1957, ese B+hombre de la vidaB; , ese B+clasico todavia hoy peligrosoB; , como lo define el propio Todd

una vida

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 very private man, Camus could be charming and prickly, sincere and theatrical, genuinely humble, yet 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 to journalism as outlets for his creativity. 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. 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 forty-six and who remains one of the most influential literary figures of our time.

Albert Camus. Una vita

Writer, publisher, war hero, French government minister, André Malraux was renowned as a Renaissance man of the twentieth century. Now, Olivier Todd–author of the acclaimed biography Albert Camus–gives us this life, in which fact competes dramatically with his subject’s previously little-known mythomania. We see the adventurous young Malraux move from 1920s literary Paris to colonial Cambodia, Cochin China, and Spain in its civil war. Todd charts the thrilling exploits that would inspire such novels as Man’s Fate, but, just as fascinating, he also traces Malraux’s lifelong pattern of lies: claiming friendship with Mao, he was called to tutor Nixon, despite having met the Great Helmsman only once; a minor injury becomes in recollections a near-mortal battlefield wound; stories of heroism in the French Resistance omit to mention that Malraux joined up just a few weeks before the Allied landings. With meticulous research, Todd separates myth from reality to throw light on a brilliant con man who would become a national hero, but he also lets us see Malraux’s genuine achievements as both writer and man of action. His real life and the one he embroidered come together in this superb biography to reveal how Malraux, the protean genius, became his own greatest character.

Malraux

A French journalist recounts his experience of the fall of Saigon, taking a close, historical look at the four months leading up to it on human, military, diplomatic, and political levels

The Fall of Saigon

Cruel April

Thomas Baudouin, français par sa mère et surtout par sa grand-mère Mado, américain par son père, Papa Dad, est un étudiant heureux de U.C.L.A., fasciné par son professeur de littérature comparée, Richard Baynes, et charmé par son copain noir, Pitch. Son service militaire au Vietnam sera plus qu'un intermède. La guerre, il la voit de loin, presque en touriste, bien installé au service de presse de l'armée américaine. Mais cette guerre, c'est aussi pour lui la découverte de l'horreur, la mort de Pitch, son frère, et une initiation amère au monde des adultes. De retour à la vie civile, Thomas reprend ses études, épouse Kate dont il a un fils, voyage, s'essaie à l'enseignement, rêve une oeuvre littéraire. Il écrit, effectivement, mais dans les journaux. Il quitte les Etats-Unis pour la France où il devient correspondant, et Kate restée à Los Angeles pour Mathilde. Il quitte enfin la presse écrite pour la télévision. Un autre regard sur le monde, sur le Vietnam où il retourne, sur l'Afrique en feu, sur le monde politique, sa pâture de journaliste... il a perdu le temps et le goût du rêve. Du pouvoir il découvre et l'attrait et les compromis. "Sais-tu à quoi les gens de ton espèce me font penser ? demande Richard Baynes à Thomas. Au Queequeg de Moby Dick : Malgré tous ses tatouages, c'était, dans l'ensemble, un cannibale très convenable. Tu es propre et convenable, présentable et de bonne compagnie. Mais comme tous les journalistes, tu dévores tes semblables tout crus. Et, tu ne t'en rends pas compte, tu te dévores toi-même."

Olivier Todd

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