Elizabeth Hawes (1)

When I picked this up I was really hoping for a meditation on how we attach ourselves to authors and construct wholly idealized and unreal idols of them for our own personal use--a sort of philosophy on the curious relationship between writer and reader, and all of the fictionalizing that goes on between the words on the page and their recipient. I am fascinated by how I often fall in love with entirely fictional constructs of real people based on what I've read of them and I want to explore that experience. Hawes does a tiny bit of that, but on the whole this is just a conventional biography. Thus my discontents with this one are entirely my fault--a case of mistaken identity. As biographies go, I'd much rather have read one on pretty much any contemporary of Camus, but given my low interest level once I realized my mistake this wasn't bad. Certainly it is informative and well-written enough, and I can now speak with considerable knowledge about a thinker whom I previously knew little. So that's good, but I'm still searching for that other book...… (meer)

I think what makes this biography so likeable is that Hawes includes her own memoir at the same time. The reader not only gets a portrait of one of the most influential writers of all time but Hawes displays her own life as well. Or at least she displays her obsession with Camus.
Small complaint. The photography Hawes chose to include of Albert Camus are tiny and interspersed in the text unlike other biographies where the photos are grouped together in large, glossy pages. I don't know if Hawes didn't receive permission to enlarge the photographs or what. The small photographs seem stingy for some reason; especially since Hawes admits that in reading Camus's journal she finds him faceless and unknown. It is in photographs that she is able to tease out the intimacies of his spirit. The reader is not privy to most of the images she describes.… (meer)