Part of Series
Withheld from publication in France for twenty-nine years after his death, and now in English for the first time, Camus' final journals give us our rawest and most intimate glimpse yet into one of the most important voices of French letters and twentieth-century literature. The first two volumes of his Notebooks began as simple instruments of his work; this final volume, recorded over the last nine years of his life, take on the characteristics of a more personal diary. Fearing that his memory was beginning to fail him, Camus noted here his reactions to the polemics stirred by The Rebel, his feelings about the Algerian War, his sojourns in Greece and Italy, thinly veiled observations on his wife and lovers, heartaches over his family, and anxiety over the Nobel Prize that he was awarded in 1957. As in the earlier Notebooks, we see here also the birth of some of Camus' greatest The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and his unfinished masterpiece, The First Man . His gorgeous travel descriptions, his political observations, and his philosophical musings are the most appealing features of these recorded thoughts. Notebooks 1951-1959 completes one of the most important set of literary "working papers" of the past century. Ryan Bloom's sensitive translation was shortlisted for the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation translation prize for nonfiction.
Author
Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel Prize of 1957 for literature. Origin and his experiences of this representative of non-metropolitan literature in the 1930s dominated influences in his thought and work. He also adapted plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Requiem for a Nun of William Faulkner. One may trace his enjoyment of the theater back to his membership in l'Equipe, an Algerian group, whose "collective creation" Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons. Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest, he came at the age of 25 years in 1938; only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation served as a columnist for the newspaper Combat. The essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942, expounds notion of acceptance of the absurd of Camus with "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction." Meursault, central character of L'Étranger (The Stranger), 1942, illustrates much of this essay: man as the nauseated victim of the absurd orthodoxy of habit, later - when the young killer faces execution - tempted by despair, hope, and salvation. Besides his fiction and essays, Camus very actively produced plays in the theater (e.g., Caligula, 1944). The time demanded his response, chiefly in his activities, but in 1947, Camus retired from political journalism. Doctor Rieux of La Peste (The Plague), 1947, who tirelessly attends the plague-stricken citizens of Oran, enacts the revolt against a world of the absurd and of injustice, and confirms words: "We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them." People also well know La Chute (The Fall), work of Camus in 1956. Camus authored L'Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom) in 1957. His austere search for moral order found its aesthetic correlative in the classicism of his art. He styled of great purity, intense concentration, and rationality. Camus died at the age of 46 years in a car accident near Sens in le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. Chinese 阿尔贝·加缪
