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Handwritten manuscript of the classic French novel L’Étranger from Albert Camus sold for more than €650,000 (£553,000) at auction, despite puzzlement over why the Nobel Prize-winning author appeared to have forged it and backdated it.
The 104-page bound draft of Camus’ novel about a French settler in Algeria who kills an unnamed Arab was sold in Paris on Wednesday.
But the document does not carry the usual literary insights of a scratched-and-corrected first draft. Instead, it appears to have been handwritten by Camus in 1944, two years after the novel was published in France.
Why Camus, who subsequently won the Nobel Prize in 1957, painstakingly copied his own published book by hand in black pen and signed and backdated it to April 1940, adding doodles, arrows and apparently humorous notes, has never been properly explained.
As Paris was under Nazi occupation at the time, it is believed that this was a way for Camus to raise much-needed funds by forging a manuscript “draft” copy for a wealthy fan.
“Its history and exact dating are mysterious, as is the development of this strange novel,” the auction house notes.
The identity of the first buyer of the fake Camus manuscript is unknown. It was later auctioned twice, in 1958 and 1991.
L’Étranger, translated into English as The Foreigner or The Outsider, had an initial print run of 4,400 copies, but quickly became a bestseller and then a classic of French literature, selling millions of copies.
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Alice Kaplan, Yale professor and author of “Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic,” said Le Figaro she hadn’t seen the manuscript, but the idea of a fake first draft was intriguing. “I really like the idea of the philosophical puzzle that this document contains… If Camus copied his own text by hand, is that a forgery?” she asked.
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