THE COMPLETE NOTEBOOKS

The Nobel Prize–winning French writer Albert Camus (1913-1960) saw the world through an absurdist lens, one polished in his youth in French Algeria, his wartime life in the Resistance, and his anti-totalitarian activism. The Stranger, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus still stand as the greatest critiques of modern bureaucratic life since those of Kafka. Camus wrote constantly throughout his life, and his notebooks offer a voice-over to the great upheavals of the mid-20th century. Now complete for the first time, in a fluent English translation, they flash with scintillating phrases. Camus thinks of an opening sentence for a novel (worthy of any Latin American magical realist): “When the evening soup was late, it meant that an execution was taking place the next morning.” Or this idea: “Write the story of a contemporary cured of his heartbreak by nothing other than the long contemplation of a landscape.” Camus records what he thinks are the central questions of modern life: Is rebellion necessary in the face of unbridled power? How can we find the strength to live in a society that has “pushed nihilism to its extreme conclusions?” When should we stop reading and writing and start acting? We get lines on moral responsibility that we might use today: “They say I’m opposed to violence, no matter what. That would be about as smart as being opposed to the wind always blowing in the same direction.” And yet, for all his politics and his polemics, Camus affirms the human focus of his work: “I only depict individuals, opposed to the machinery of the State, because I know of what I speak.” Camus invites us, now, to speak of what we know and to act on it.