A handwritten manuscript of the classic French novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus has sold for more than €650,000 (£553,000) at auction, despite bafflement over the reasons for which the Nobel prize-winning author appeared to have faked and backdated it.
The bound, 104-page draft of Camus’s novel about a French settler in Algeria who kills an unnamed Arab man went under the hammer in Paris on Wednesday.
But the document does not carry the usual literary insights of a scrawled 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 went on to win the Nobel prize in 1957, painstakingly copied out 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.
With Paris under Nazi occupation at the time, it is thought to have been a way for Camus to raise much-needed funds by faking a handwritten “draft” copy for a wealthy fan.
“Its history and precise dating are mysterious, as is the progress of this strange novel,” the auction house said in its notes.
The identity of the first buyer of Camus’s fake manuscript is unknown. It was later sold at auction twice, in 1958 and 1991.
L’Étranger, translated in English as The Stranger 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, a professor at Yale and the author of Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic, told Le Figaro she had not seen the manuscript, but that the notion of a fake first draft was intriguing. “I really like the idea of the philosophical puzzle that this document contains … If Camus copies out his own text by hand, is that a fake?” she asked.
