Hawes’s Camus infatuation led her to write her honors thesis on the man, and then matured into a decades-long involvement in the work and the biography (much travel to his places, many interviews with surviving family, friends, and colleagues), and has led at last to the publication of “Camus, A Romance,’’ a biographical study which could not be more aptly titled. From start to finish Hawes is in relation with her subject, his writings and his life, all her energy devoted to getting closer, though her admiration at times carries her from sleuthing to something a bit more enmeshed.
Camus compressed a great deal of living into his tragically short life. Born in Algeria in 1913, he announced himself early as a writer of lyric as well as reflective and polemical gifts. He moved to France in 1942 and very quickly found himself at the center of Parisian intellectual life, which for a period seemed to be the center of intellectual life period. During the war and immediately after, Camus was everywhere. Heralded as a thinker and writer by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he became part of their cadre, joining the “fiestas with the heavy drinking, dancing, casual sex, and desperate fun.’’ At the same time he was editing the pro-Resistance journal Combat, writing and staging plays, and before long trying to shrug off the “existentialist’’ tag conferred by the international press. It was no use. Camus was destined to be the avatar of the post-war craze - the chic - that life was absurd. His protagonist Merseault killed a man without a motive; his rats brought plague to the city of Oran; and his editorials in Combat excoriated the war that left millions dead in trenches and concentration camps. He resonated the mood of the times. Life was meaningless, and Camus was its prophet.
