WHEN Albert Camus died in a car crash in 1960, the unfinished manuscript for his novel, Le Premier Homme, was found with him.
For 34 years it remained unpublished - his wife's decision. She did not want this book - highly political in 60s France, and highly personal - which was unrevised, unfinished, lacking punctuation and a firm structure, to give ammunition to those who were saying Camus was finished as a writer.
His daughter, Catherine, explains in the preface to the English edition, that she and her brother were persuaded, eventually, to publish, because: 'we believed a manuscript of such importance would sooner or later be published unless we destroyed it. Since we had no right to destroy it, we preferred to publish it ourselves, so it would appear exactly as it was.' Had her father lived, Catherine Camus states, the novel would have been different: he was a reserved man and would have masked his feelings more in any final version.
This is not, yet, a novel. Camus has scribbled messages to himself: Put this piece before that. Is it night? Or, tellingly, when Jacques, the protagonist, appears as an adult looking back at his life, the author writes himself a note: 'From the beginning show the alien in Jacques more'.
So what we have is a shifting course of ideas, without any fixed structure. Names, incidents are fleeting and changeable. Yet, despite its unintentioned deconstruction, this is still a very touching piece.
The chapters have almost biblical titles: In Search of the Father; The Son. It seems that the book is intended to be an exploration of the individual odyssey: a look at what makes a man the way he is.