The French writer and philosopher Albert Camus was undoubtedly one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. In short, Camus expanded and disseminated the term absurdism, which in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) is defined as the conflict between humans’ desire for meaning and the inherent lack of meaning. This is to say: it couldn’t care less about our supplications or prayers, or our endless speculations about what the hell we’re doing here—laugh, cry, die, whatever; it won’t make a damn difference.
Misunderstanding followed Camus like a shadow. Let’s get the biggie out of the way: Camus was not an Existentialist. Period. He rejected the label and went out of his way to show why. Thus, Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre (who espoused the philosophical framework) could not have been more antithetical.
If there was one reason for Albert Camus’ appeal, it was his humanism. He speaks to a certain disposition, whatever the century. The Stranger (1942), for example, articulates the torpor of existence, when an indifference burns like a sun through your body, disabling you from thinking, let alone having the language to express the malaise. Yet when you do, the words fall out of your mouth like coins from a slot machine, making no sense, no coherence, no point.
Camus made you marvel at the indifferent universe not in solipsist dejection, but in solidarity with others fighting the same futile battle. As readers will likely know, he turned the struggle into an analogy: Sisyphus condemned perpetually to roll a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down. Yet, Camus insists, we must imagine him happy.
Unlike some philosophers (Hegel and Heidegger), Camus was a lucid and engaging writer, as seen in The Complete Notebooks. It begins with him as a writer in the early 1930s and follows his ascent as an eminent cultural figure in the 1950s. The Complete Notebooks—written between 1933 and 1959, published for the first time in one comprehensive volume—is adroitly translated and annotated by Ryan Bloom, who contextualizes the entries with extensive footnotes.
At 712 pages, The Complete Notebooks is a tome. Despite its size and chronological account, these epigrammatic entries are neither overwhelming nor repetitive. Instead, you feel like you are hanging out with an avuncular friend who knows what he is imparting will console you in days that neither seem to start nor end; those days that contain months in minutes.
The power of this collection lies in reading inchoate ideas for novels and essays, as well as seeing Camus musings on literature. The Romantic poet John Keats famously enthused about poetry, but Camus is equally enthralled by literature. For example, he is overjoyed at imagining people hearing Homer’s Odyssey for the first time. Conversely, he dislikes Rainer Maria Rilke’s only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), calling it “an insignificant book”.
We find different versions of Albert Camus throughout. Like life, perspectives, ideas, dispositions, moods, and writing styles change within this collection. Yet we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking these are raw expressions of Camus. These versions of him are, to a certain extent, a performance. Like any piece of art, an artifice is at play; in this case, the editing.
As Bloom pens in the translator’s introduction, the notebooks were typed at different points, when Camus revised and “corrected” the text; likely fully correcting notebooks I-III, while only partially correcting IV-VII. These are not minor corrections, as Bloom explicates. For instance, in the 1930s, Camus writes, “I come to Communism”, but, in the typed, corrected version, it reads as “I reject Communism”. It was likely corrected 20 years after Camus wrote the initial entry, when he turned against communism.
Camus moved or rearranged entries to give the impression that he had a clearer impression at the time of writing; moreover, he implemented entries that did not exist in the original notebooks. In his 1996 biography, Albert Camus: A Life, Olivier Todd writes that the author “really wasn’t the one for first drafts”. He explains that Camus “liked rewriting as much as the initial writing itself”. This is exemplified in The Complete Notebooks.
In Notebook I, there are scintillating descriptions of a 23-year-old Camus on an Italian trip, viewing frescoes by the Italian and Proto-Renaissance painter Giotto in the Basilica di Santa Croce, in Florence. Here, you also find lines that would be incorporated into his first written novel, The Happy Death (as titled in The Complete Notebooks), posthumously published in 1971. At this point, Camus wrote in an ornate style—metaphors flying like kites. Undoubtedly, Camus rendered his language more sparingly after The Happy Death.
The footnotes are essential to every reader. In August 1937, Camus writes in Notebook I, “Novel: the man who understands that to live you have to be rich, who devotes himself entirely to making money, who succeeds, lives and dies happy.” The footnote reads, “A succinct overview of The Happy Death and the first time Camus refers to the project as a novel.” Without the footnote, we would not know this was the first time Camus referred to the project as a novel. Along with his succinct translation, Bloom deserves applause for the footnotes.
There are coruscating moments throughout The Complete Notebooks: one of the first ideas for The Stranger (75); an early hint of Jean-Baptiste Clamence’s mindset in The Fall (77); how Moby-Dick, which had just been translated into French in 1941, would influence the narrative style of The Plague (161); a letter written but never sent to the literary critic André Rousseau, complaining about his review of The Stranger (177); the original opening line of The Rebel is not unlike The Myth of Sisyphus (287); George Orwell and Camus missed meeting at Les Deux Magots in February 1945 (299).
Another interesting section is Albert Camus’ travels in South America from June to August 1949. During the trip, Camus was reading the 19th-century French poet Alfred de Vigny, which spoke to his current state of mind. Furthermore, Camus met Brazilian novelist and poet Aníbal Machado, poets Augusto Frederico Schmidt and Murilo Mendes, describing the latter as “a sharp and melancholy mind”.
The Complete Notebooks evince a writer who saw the perils of abstraction, as humans potentially become subordinate to ideology, ciphers instead of flesh-and-blood. Also, Camus rallied against hope, because hope points toward an unpromised future and thus opposes authenticity: to live authentically, one must be aware of one’s mortality and remain rooted in the present.
Many notebooks of established writers can be insipid and, at worst, superfluous. Needless to say, The Complete Notebooks is indispensable for Albert Camus scholars and readers alike. It delineates how Camus can, with one sentence, make you pause, think, re-evaluate, feel, and realize that being alive is the great rebellion against the absurd.