While his wife and children waited for him at home, Camus carried on casual seductions, as well as maintaining an official affair with his mistress Maria Casar s. He also boasted of his seductions and kept an explicit diary in which he described and analyzed them. Camus didn't find himself as a writer until L'Etranger, yet the first half of Mr. McCarthy's book is largely taken up with tortuous and not very interesting paraphrases and analyses of the early books. Perhaps this is the sort of thankless job that the biographer cannot avoid. About the only unequivocally favorable thing we learn about Camus was that he was deeply attached to his mother, who is described as silent, illiterate and partly deaf.
Transparency means the way in which the concrete world dissolves into near-emptiness.
Lucidity, Mr. McCarthy tells us, becomes a destructive force which undermines the artist's imaginative conquest. Whatever this sentence may mean, it does seem to have been taken seriously by many French writers. If he is to reach the coolness and avoid dying, then he has to dispatch the Arab, who is seen as defending the refuge of the river. When one reads that Sartre rejected the validity of inner life and was convinced that consciousness was empty, it is hard to know what to do with such a statement. The same is true of the biographer's observation that Camus's technical achievement was helping to teach other novelists that characters should not be rounded, that language is only occasionally accurate and that the work of art should contain its own explicit negation.