THE FIRST MAN by Albert Camus,...

THE FIRST MAN by Albert Camus, translated from the French by David Hapgood (Vintage: $12, 325 pp.) The manuscript of this unfinished novel was found in the wreckage of the auto accident that took the life of the Nobel Prize-winner in 1960; his heirs waited 35 years to publish it.

Jacques Cormery, a man of French descent raised in Algeria, devotes himself to uncovering the life of his father, who was killed in World War I. He eventually learns that the mystery of his father’s life was “only the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without a past, that sends them into the vast throng of the nameless dead who made the world while they themselves were destroyed forever.”

Hapgood’s translation captures the understated eloquence of Camus’ prose.