Notebooks 1935-1942: Volume 1

"My third book is a bit unconventional, it’s the first volume of his Notebooks , which go from 1935 to 1942. They are absolutely wonderful. There are three volumes of notebooks. The third volume is, for reasons I don’t understand, incredibly difficult to come by unless you want to spend a significant amount of money. The first two are readily available on Amazon and elsewhere. These notebooks give many insights into Camus as a person, who he was and what he was trying to come to terms with day by day. They are indispensable, I think, for understanding what his larger project was throughout the rest of his writings. It’s a bit of both. There are excerpts from different novels that he’s working on, and that’s really interesting. You can see passages in a novel where he’s trying out a turn of phrase, or where he’s using it repeatedly to see how it will sound. There are whole passages of A Happy Death in the second volume. This is about him understanding how the philosophy that he’s trying to work out can be applied to how he lives his life and how he relates to other people. It’s just really powerful and has some of the most beautiful passages in his writing. I sat down and just read it until I was done because the language was so beautiful and the depth of his emotions was so powerful that I was just sucked in. But it’s definitely the sort of book that you can have on a coffee table and pick up and open at random. You will find something incredibly insightful and powerful if you do that, especially in the first volume. I would pick two other themes that he continually returns to. There’s this notion of exile—even within The Plague the word ‘exile’ appears 23 times. It seems an odd choice of word to describe people imprisoned behind the town gates. I think this is something that he struggled with himself. He felt he didn’t really belong anywhere, that he was an exile and a stranger everywhere he went. The other is rebellion: this notion that the world as it is ought to be rejected and something new and, hopefully, better constructed in its place. That’s right because, even within Algeria, he was what was called a pied noir , the son of a French colonialist in Algeria. He didn’t really feel he belonged there. Not that he ever felt at home in Paris, either. There’s always the sense, and it comes through really powerful in the Notebooks , of his sense of alienation and of being outside something that he wants to be part of. So, ‘exile’ is a very important theme. Then, secondly, the notion of rebellion is, I think, the culminating theme of Camus’ work. Political rebellion is one of the manifestations that rebellion could have, but I think he’s interested in rebellion more broadly, as we’ll see when we come to speak about The Rebel ."