Review: Jean McGarry on Camus
I had relished the notebooks Camus wrote in his twenties, read when I was just as young. Encountering a new, much-expanded edition now in a different world
The Complete Notebooks of Albert Camus, skillfully translated and thickly annotated, feels confessional to this reviewer, and may account for my borrowing something of that penitential tone. Why? Partly because the 701 pages were hard to read, and even (gulp) a disappointment to one who had relished the first translated collection, read when I was in my twenties and written when Camus was just as young, and in the midst of producing his first triad of books: The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Caligula.
At the height of philosophical Existentialism, with its creed of self-denial and heroic life challenges—not so different from the codes and commands of my Catholic youth—the notebooks commingled samples of Camus’s existential confessions, along with patches of lyrical writing devoted to the Algerian landscape, Camus’s beloved homeland. What happened in the intervening decades to make the Camusian rumination less of a pleasure and more of a grind?
