Fame! A Misunderstanding | Los Angeles Review of Books

Albert Camus has long been misunderstood, but a new translation of his complete notebooks offers a corrective. The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus. Translated by Ryan Bloom. University of Chicago Press, 2026. 712 pages.Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!EACH NEW TRANSLATION of a work from a major author should spark a reevaluation of that author’s critical reception and public reputation. Since his death in 1960, a number of posthumously published works by Albert Camus have been translated into English. This has included A Happy Death (1971), his abandoned first novel; The First Man (1994), his unfinished final novel; and several collections of lyrical essays, journalism, lectures, correspondence, and notebooks, covering his entire creative life. And yet the public image of Camus has remained stubbornly unchanged since his initial reception in the 1940s, with each new translation either reinforcing a caricature—Camus as an existentialist or a philosopher of the absurd—or else simply not being read at all because of how uninteresting this caricature was. It is a silhouette projected as much by admirers of Camus as it is by those indifferent or hostile to him.The latest in a quixotic lineage of translators is Ryan Bloom, who previously translated the third volume of Camus’s notebooks, his South America and United States travel journals, and his collected plays. Bloom’s most recent contribution is a translation of The Complete Notebooks, a 712-page volume that brings together for the first time a new, consistent translation of all three previously published volumes of Camus’s notebooks, covering the period between 1935 and 1959. It also includes Camus’s 1949 South America journals as well as his reading notes from 1933, the earliest known notebook.

The most remarkable inclusion, however, is the translation of previously unpublished notes from 1938 to 1942, written when Camus was in Oran, Algeria, writing The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. The Oran Notebook—only discovered in 1988—is the most revealing of all of Camus’s notebooks, written, uncharacteristically, in a direct and personal style. It provides fresh insights into the background of Camus’s first works. This alone is worth the price of admission.¤One difficulty in reviewing an author’s private journals is that they can’t be read in isolation. They remain a storeroom, a backstage, a rehearsal space, the full significance of which can only be registered when considered in relation to the author’s public-facing works. Take, for example, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, both published in 1942. The Complete Notebooks defamiliarizes these famous works.By June 1938, Camus had already completed a draft of A Happy Death, his first attempt at writing a novel. His teacher and mentor, Jean Grenier, was less than enthusiastic with the results. Camus revised the manuscript, and over the next six months, he transformed it into what would later become The Stranger. But this transformation was accompanied by a crucial shift in his thinking and approach to his own writing.“We think only in images,” Camus noted in 1936, the year he began writing A Happy Death. “If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.” But in 1938, he reviewed Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, which challenged his earlier opinion. In the published review, Camus wrote: “[T]he philosophy need only spill over into the characters and action for it to stick out like a sore thumb, the plot to lose its authenticity, and the novel its life.” For Camus, Sartre had “broken” the balance between images and ideas. This was also a self-criticism, leveled at A Happy Death.In 1938, Camus also discovered Franz Kafka, newly translated into French. By February 1939, he was writing an essay on The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926): the beginning of a series of literary essays that became The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus thought The Trial was a work that articulated the contours of a particular human experience, where the ballast that maintained the balance between images and ideas was the human body. In The Castle, however, Kafka had—like Sartre—betrayed this experience, creating instead a work of consolatory hope. In Sisyphus, Camus criticized this subordination of literary fiction to philosophy. “The thesis-novel, the work that proves the most hateful of all, is the one that most often is inspired by a smug thought,” he wrote. “Those creators are philosophers, ashamed of themselves.”In August 1936, after completing his bachelor’s dissertation on Christian metaphysics and Neoplatonism, Camus told Grenier that he’d like to do more work in a similar vein: “I mean of a technical nature and in philosophy.” Earlier that year, Camus made a passing reference in his notebooks to write a “Philosophical Work” on “absurdity.” No other references on this topic appear until December 1938—after his encounters with Sartre and Kafka—and at this time, he makes his own attempts at writing fiction. Here, he writes a long note about the difference between absurdity and irrationality, and the importance of resisting hope, an emotion he associated with irrationality.Later, in Sisyphus, this opposition to hope would underpin the charge he leveled against a number of thinkers, from Søren Kierkegaard to Edmund Husserl—the charge of “philosophical suicide”—a form of thinking that betrays itself, by seeking to escape from its own pre-philosophical conditions. Sisyphus transposes the criticism he had previously directed at Kafka and Sartre—and at himself—into a literary argument against philosophy itself. In February 1939, Camus told Grenier: “I have many projects. I am working on my essay on the Absurd. I have given up making a thesis out of it. It will be a personal work.”The first line of Sisyphus explicitly announces this abandonment of philosophy: “The pages that follow deal with an absurd sensitivity that can be found widespread in the age—and not with an absurd philosophy which our time, properly speaking, has not known” (emphasis added).

The second paragraph then suggests his literary approach: “There will be found here merely the description, in the pure state, of an intellectual malady. No metaphysic, no belief is involved in it for the moment.”The first part of Sisyphus outlines Camus’s argument against philosophical discourse, while the final part outlines the alternative: literary discourse as a legitimate form of human inquiry. Here Camus clarifies the statements he made in the opening pages by further distinguishing the artistic creator from the philosopher. As human beings, they may both begin with the same experience, but the philosopher proceeds by “explaining and solving” away the experience (by reducing it to a mere concept, an abstraction) while the artist resists such attempts at escape (accepting the impossibility of such conceptual closure) and is concerned simply with the act of “experiencing and describing.” As he states in the Oran Notebook, “You would have to experience and embody the life of an artist, and that life alone. That’s the essential meaning of making a choice. And that’s where we find the apparent contradiction. But the first part of Sisyphus gives the solution.”It would therefore be incorrect to read Sisyphus and conclude, as many have done over the past 80 years, that Camus was somehow attempting to produce a “philosophy of the absurd”—a claim disavowed in the very first line of that book. And it would be equally incorrect to consider, as many still do, that The Stranger is a thesis-novel, an illustration of such a philosophy—a claim Camus explicitly argued against in the final part of Sisyphus.The literary form of Sisyphus very much enacts what it otherwise argues: the passion, freedom, and revolt of the artist transposed into an intellectual style. The Complete Notebooks confirms time and again that Camus distanced himself from philosophy and saw himself first and foremost as an artist. “The absurd world,” he notes, “receives only an aesthetic justification.”¤The charge of “philosophical suicide” in Sisyphus sets the metaphor of self-destruction against its literal counterpart—physical suicide—an act Camus equally rejects. The point is to maintain the primacy of the human body in experiencing the world.

These arguments—against hope, against philosophy as a form of intellectual suicide, for the primacy of the body, and for an awareness of its finitude—are found in their raw form in Camus’s notebooks: “Thought is always ahead of things. It sees too far, further than the body, which is in the present. To take away hope is to bring thought back to the body—and the body must rot.”In the 1940s and 1950s, Camus extended his argument against philosophical suicide to encompass an argument against political murder: murder justified or legitimized by philosophy. For Camus, instrumental violence can only lead to abstraction and the devaluing of human life. In its physical form, Camus rejected violence in the form of the death penalty, war, and revolutionary violence. In its symbolic form, Camus rejected polemic, insult, and lying. “Every time we decide to take an individual as an enemy,” he wrote in his notebooks, “we make him an abstraction. We move further from the person. […] He becomes a silhouette.”¤Camus told Jean Grenier that he had abandoned writing a technical, philosophical work and had decided instead on a more literary, “personal work.” The Oran Notebook reveals just how personal this was. It suggests that his argument against suicide—in both its physical and symbolic forms—might stem from an actual suicidal moment in his own life, an experience that changed his perspective, and prompted the crucial shift in his thinking later that same year. “That day, every car was a temptation. I could see their wheels rolling over me—and from within my otherwise motionless body, another being reached out to that soulless force that would have flattened me,” he notes in March 1938. “I’d accepted the idea of dying and I was no longer thinking like a living person but like one who’d already been sentenced.”This was Camus’s state of mind when he read the fiction of Kafka and Sartre later that same year, the state in which he abandoned his own novel manuscript and began approaching the absurd more critically. Again, the Oran Notebook:I was erecting barriers between which I was narrowing the possibilities of my life, and, in taking man’s freedom seriously, I can now see that I was doing the same thing that so many bureaucrats of the mind and heart do, those people who inspire in me nothing but disgust.