Description
The man of the title should be the father of Jacques Cormery, the main character of this story. But little is known of this immigrant, killed in the First World War, who married an illiterate woman from Menorca for barely the time necessary to have two children. The poor have no history. The real first man is the son: fatherless, raised in a sordid neighbourhood of Algiers by a strict grandmother who inflicted corporal punishments in front of a helpless mother, exhausted by her "work" in the houses of others. How did this destitute kid end up winning the Nobel Prize for Literature? This novel, that shows how the kid constructs himself slowly, in a completely different way to what was expected, would seem the story of Albert Camus' own childhood.
