The First Man

"I love this book. It is Camus turning back to his roots in a very poor community in Algiers. This was a man whose moral compass was not the grand ideologies of the twentieth century, but how people like his illiterate grandmother would fit into it. He famously rejected the violence of anti-colonial Marxism when he realised that he couldn’t support anything that might put a bomb on a bus that his grandmother might ride. There is throughout his writing a real empathy for ordinary human beings in complicated or conflicted situations, a sense that we could all be in their place. Camus is very moral, and decent, in ways I hope I can be, but I fear I’m not nearly so Holy."