On January 4, 1960, Albert Camus died in a traffic accident. In a briefcase found next to the tree against which his car crashed, there was, among other objects, a manuscript in embryonic state. Those pages became at that precise moment the last work of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 award . The story did not see the light of day until 1995, the year in which Catherine gave to publisher the story of her father, the last one she wrote, but the first one she lived: the one that intended to tell who Albert Camus was.

The First Man is an atypical autobiographical novel, as it stars a character who does not bear the author's name and is written in the third person. It may be that telling this story required not only the distance provided by time, but also that of the space that separates Paris from Algeria and especially that of the climate created by a literary style that draws a dividing line between the "I" and the "he". Be that as it may, these are the most personal pages of a child who never knew his father. The work begins precisely like this: "To you, who will never be able to read this book". These are words that resonate between the lines of an autobiography written not to be read by its addressee, who remains somewhat indeterminate: the father who died in the Great War, the illiterate mother or perhaps the father-son who left his children an interrupted life narrative.

This is a story full of humanity that revolves around the story of a poor family of which there are no traces left in history books, but an indelible mark in the heart and pen of the writer who never forgot the happiness of the child who grew up under the Algerian sun. Jacques Cormery/ Albert Camus is part of a lineage marked by emigration due to economic reasons and by the tragedy of losing his husband-father at a very early age. He is, moreover, that subject of human being who, after living abroad, returns to his origin in a double journey of recognition/ reunion: to that journey made by his French German shepherd father and his Algerian mother of Spanish origin to a desolate territory of the African country where the son was born and to that pilgrimage in which the son, now an adult, visit the tomb of his father in Saint-Brieu, France, where the finding that probably originated the longing to write his story takes place: "It was at that moment that he read on the tombstone the date of his father's birth, realizing then that he had ignored it. Then he read the two dates, '1885-1914', and mechanically made the calculation: twenty-nine years. Suddenly, he was struck by a thought that shook him even physically. He was forty. The man buried under that tombstone, and who had been his father, was younger than he was."

That existential shock felt by the adult-child who has grown up without a father leads him to verbalize what he has concealed among the words used to narrate other people's lives: "I need my father". Hence he decides to return to the suburbs of Algiers, where he grew up in a home dominated by the intimidating figure of his grandmother and the silent presence-absence of his mother. Africa, the return home, makes his heart beat with the expectation of light, healing and "the warm poverty" that had pushed him since he was a child to overcome all obstacles to become who he was. But this return also forces him to confess that on this path he has distanced himself from his mother, whom he questions to learn more about his father. However, this almost deaf woman is unable to accurately remember her husband: the report of the poor is a "report in shadows" worn out by grief and work. This return is also linked to her gratitude to her primary school teacher, Mr. Bernard, who made possible the route that led her to knowledge, to books, to the university, to France; in final, to what is on the other shore of the Mediterranean.

Jacques/Albert, the protagonist of this story abruptly interrupted by his own death, is a symbol of people who, having left home in search of a future, a dream or an identity, suddenly turn their faces towards that first man they had to imagine-invent. In making this gesture, they discover that, at the beginning, at the origin, there is not the dead father or the self-made son, but the mother, to whom he dedicates these words: "O mother, O tender, dear child, greater than my time, greater than the history that subjected you to it, truer than all I have loved in this world, O mother, forgive your son who fled from the night of your truth".

Therefore, Jacques' most important quality is the courage of humble people who, despite the separation (wanted or imposed) from their roots, manage to find a way to return to childhood or to the warmth of a world populated by simple people who know what it means to humanize the world: that nocturnal truth of which the mother is an allegory.