“A beautiful memoir of a life-long obsession, a peek behind the curtains at the biographer’s art, and, not least, a rich and vivid portrait of Camus himself.”
—Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine

Seen & Heard Around The Web

Head Butler Blog finds Camus, a Romance re-awakens sense of mourning

Because she’s such a fine writer, Hawes creates indelible scenes. You can’t understand Camus without appreciating his childhood, and Hawes is brilliant here. It’s not that she’s uncovered much new; it’s that she piles on the visual details, until we can see this poor boy, living in a small apartment with a widowed mother who was illiterate, partially deaf and largely mute. They had no heat, hot water or oven.

—Jesse Kornbluth January, 2011

The Rain in my Purse Blog gets reacquainted with a flawed but attractive Camus

Say you’re a college student studying philosophy and you spend hours trawling through Kant and Heidegger and Plato and even Sartre and maybe a female philosopher now and then and then you hit upon Camus with his melty good looks, his melancholy expression and his cute out-of-proportion ear. You are going to sit up and pay attention. He looks approachable, modern, if a bit retro. There’s no denying Albert Camus was an attractive man, a writer who was also a philosopher and moralist and who was fated to be an intellectual sex symbol. If he’d been American, Marilyn Monroe would have eaten him whole.

—Sarah Sloat September 20, 2010

Post from Blogger Djelloul Marbrook

"I have a reason of my own for giving much thought to Camus. He was finishing his studies at the University of Algiers the year I was born in that city. It was 1934 and the French had ruled Algeria for more than a century. He was born to an Alsatian father and a mute Spanish mother. I was born to an American of German descent and an Algerian Arab father. Neither Camus nor I ever felt quite at home in our adopted countries, he in France and me in America.  We saw things as otherlings see them and we understood the nature of otherness, that issue that haunts America and Europe today."

—Djelloul Marbrook August 31, 2010

From BlogaBook

"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."

— August 17, 2009

From whoistheabsurdman.blogspot.com

"We recently read a new biography on Albert Camus by Elizabeth Hawes, titled Camus: A Romance. If you want to find out more about the life of Camus, and what sort of fellow he was, without tackling the doorstopper tomes of Lottman or Todd, then we recommend the book..."

— August 12th, 2009

From pentamento.blogspot.com

"Never quite as taken with Camus as Elizabeth Hawes, biographer and author of "Camus, A Romance" I admit I read all his books, went to Paris to find him, years too late, and cling to the notion that in his steps I'd find a literary path. A must read for those who thought existentially and live absurdly."

— July 22, 2009

A tweet from The Diane Rehm Show

Elizabeth Hawes: "Camus, A Romance" (Grove Press): A writer describes her forty-year affair of the heart and mind. http://bit.ly/19jgaK

— July 27, 2009

From SavannahNow.com Forums

"The title of a recent biography of Albert Camus by Elizabeth Hawes. She does a commendable job of conveying, as best as any biographer can, the inner workings of this very private man who was so paradoxically public.... Well worth your time if you have an interest in French thought and life during WWII and the reverberations which came in the 1950s."

— July 29, 2009