Jamie Lombardi's Reading List

"I’m going to be a bit of a rebel here. My first pick is The Fall . This is my absolute favourite novel by Camus. It’s very short. In fact, the first time I read it was on a plane flying from New York to Amsterdam and I finished it with time to spare. It is. It’s told from the first-person perspective of an unreliable narrator, telling the tale of how he came to find himself in this bar in Amsterdam, having left Paris. It’s a really fascinating book. Yes. One of the things that makes this one so interesting, particularly once you get a sense of who Camus was as a person, is how autobiographical it is and how much of this is him putting himself in the seat of judgment, trying to make sense of his own place in the world, his own decisions, and the impact that he’s had on other people. The novel itself is fascinating but then, put in the context of Camus’ life and his relationships with other people who influenced it, it really becomes a very powerful work, I think. That’s right. The narrator is telling the story of how, as he’s on the way home from work one night, a woman jumps from the bridge into the river and there’s this moment where he’s able to make a decision. He can turn back and save the woman, or he can continue on his path. He turns away, he goes on, and we’re left to believe that the woman has drowned in the river—though the narrator himself never looks back or checks to see the consequences of his inaction. This episode consumes the novel and it’s about him making sense of who he is and how his actions reveal his real place in the world. It’s about how our place in the world may be at odds with the titles we take for ourselves, or the way people refer to us because of the stories that we’ve told them. Somewhere in between there’s the truth and somehow that matters still. That’s correct. Camus’ wife had quite a bit of difficulty with the way that Camus lived his life. The extent to which Camus’ treatment of her contributed to her mental health issues or vice versa is unclear, but she suffered acutely from mental health issues and had attempted suicide. Camus felt very much burdened by this and felt very responsible for this. His journals during the time reveal that he felt acutely aware of his personal responsibility for contributing to such an acute state of misery. Interestingly, Camus was far from the only one to judge himself at fault. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins also includes a fictionalized rendering of the toll his behaviour took on his wife. I just think it gets at something really important about how our relationships to one another and the stories we tell about our relationships to each other impact our understanding of who we are, and where that enables us to locate ourselves in the world. The narrator in The Fall works as a judge, and it’s his job to mete out judgment, to decide whether people are good or bad, whether they get a reprieve, or they go to prison. And this instance with the woman on the bridge fundamentally upends his sense of who he is and he’s unable to return to where he had belonged in the world. And I think that really speaks to the power of narrative and the way our understanding of our interpersonal conflicts helps to mediate our relationships, for better or worse. That’s central to so much of Camus’ project, because he’s really focused on the importance of ‘the other’ and the way that that prevents us from avoiding the exile that we would otherwise find ourselves in. For him, the absurd was a starting point. He says in The Myth of Sisyphus , which is perhaps his most famous work, that it’s a point of departure. The absurd itself doesn’t tell us anything about the world or what we should do with it. It’s just a way of experiencing reality. In The Fall there’s an element of absurdity to be walking home from work one day, as you regularly do, and then to be confronted with this life-altering, almost cataclysmic event where this woman throws herself to her death right in front of you. It illustrates the unreliability and the inherent chaos in the world. In fact, there’s a line in one of his journals where he says, “The absurdity of the catastrophe does not alter the fact that it exists.” And I think he was really struck by the unreasonableness of human suffering and how that permeated every aspect of human existence. But ultimately, no matter how absurd, unfair, or unjust the world, there is freedom in our choices and our actions. I think that’s totally consistent with what Camus is writing about. How these different things go on to shape us is, itself, absurd because, as Nagel would say, this is holding someone accountable for the chance happenings of fate and that doesn’t really make a lot of sense once you think it all the way through."

"The second book is The Plague . Yes. I’m reading it for the third time now, as we all shelter in place to deal with this global pandemic. I really liked it the first time that I read it, obviously enough to read it a second time. But on this third reading, actually sitting through this and having experiences that are similar to what’s happening to the characters in the book, it really brings home just how powerful his insights were into human nature and the way that we respond to the contradiction between simultaneously feeling isolated and separated from everyone we know and yet also exiled because of the way that that separation makes us feel. Yes, and I think he does that on purpose. He also sets it up in a town that he describes as utterly bleak and ugly. He’s not particularly kind to the townsfolk and he describes them as going through their lives without thinking and without really living either. I think that’s the contrast that he’s setting up, to make a point about how important it is to make use of our lives instead of just thoughtlessly wasting them away. Yes, I think that’s all right. The book is meant to be jarring and is drawing our attention to how much of our lives is superficial and meaningless and yet somehow still takes up most of our energy. He’s got a line in The Plague where he talks about people thinking of freedom as a right, rather than a duty. They’ve got this mercantile understanding of our relationships to others in which the ability to make money is paramount at the expense of all else. And I think that is just so important when talking about this, because he’s drawing attention to the fact that freedom doesn’t really make sense without others and freedom isn’t meant to be this sort of limitless thing where you get to do whatever you want, particularly in pursuit of money and business, which he’s generally suspicious of. Rather, freedom is this recognition that we are bound to one another and that what really matters in life, when we’re really doing something meaningful, is when we’re acting in solidarity, even, and perhaps especially, if that means putting ourselves at risk. No. The bourgeoisie are never really going to get much sympathy from Camus because he sees them as largely complicit in the perpetuation of human suffering. He was very much affected by his own poverty, and the effect that poverty had on the life of his mother, whom he absolutely adored. He was always aware of the role that social classes played. Part of that was just a baked-in disdain for the oppression that contributed to human suffering. But, more importantly, I don’t think Camus would be particularly judgmental of individuals acting in their way. I think he was much more invested in criticizing the larger system. He says in The Plague that most people aren’t bad, they just misunderstand what’s important and that far more can be accomplished by understanding human behaviour that way. It has been said that he did extensive research for The Plague . The ‘plague’ is generally taken to be a metaphor or meta-commentary on Nazism during World War II. I’m not necessarily sold on that as the exclusive interpretation of the novel. Other people have argued that he was reading about plagues during the time that he was writing this. But one thing that’s really interesting in the background is that, for at least a period of time while writing the novel, Camus was trying to recover from a bout of tuberculosis and he was staying in a village in southern France in the Free Zone (Vichy). The remarkable events that took place there were the basis for the book called Lest Innocent Blood be Shed by Philip Paul Hallie. In this small, poor, rural village they banded together and pooled their resources to save somewhere between three and five thousand Jews from the Nazis. Camus was in this village as this was happening, as people were hiding, as they were separated from their loved ones, while he himself was separated from his loved ones. So, I’m not sure to what degree the astute nature of his writing can be attributed to his reading about previous plagues, or to his first-hand experience of being bedridden with an illness, embedded in a town where people were hiding from a much more militaristic and malignant sort of ‘plague’. Yes. He was also there for a time."

"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 ."

"The next book I want to pick is an anthology: it’s The Lyrical and Critical Essays. This is a series of his political and literary essays that give you a sense both of who he was as a critical writer, as an essayist, and as a journalist, but also ties into his philosophy and the ideas that he was trying to make sense of. No. He was alive at the time of publication for this collection and the preface he wrote for it in 1958 alone justifies adding this to the list because he is at his most direct and confessional about what he hopes to accomplish. The Lyrical and Critical Essays is one of my favourites because it contains one of my all-time favourite essays by him, which is ‘The Almond Trees’. There’s a passage that is just so beautiful and really encapsulates what I think he’s working towards. In it he says, “We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness and meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task, but ‘superhuman’ is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish. That’s all.” Yes. That’s right. I think it was Nietzsche who said that all philosophy is biography . It makes sense that the philosophy that resonates with you is the philosophy that comes closest to the view of the world that you have. I think that’s absolutely correct. For me, it is in Camus’ writing very often that I find passages that are helpful in trying to make sense of a world that, quite frankly, is so absurd that the question of how to go on living in it can consume all our attention. I completely agree. One of the limitations with philosophy, at least as it’s practised most commonly in academic philosophy, is that it’s written in such a way that people don’t want to read it. It’s difficult, it’s challenging, and in many ways that’s to its credit. The rigour is important for filtering out the nuance that we need in order to understand these complicated issues. But it’s off-putting and doesn’t pull in regular people, whom philosophers should be trying to reach if the goal is not to just understand the world, but to change it. And Camus definitely thought the world should be changed. Yes. He’s got an essay in here called ‘The Wrong Side and the Right Side’ about a woman who uses a small inheritance to buy a funeral plot and spends the rest of her days tending to her investment. One day she sees that someone, seeing her gravesite empty, has left her flowers and she realizes that to the world she is already dead. It is, I think, an injunction not to sleepwalk through our lives and live while we can. “It makes sense that the philosophy that resonates with you is the philosophy that comes closest to the view of the world that you have” Also, ‘Prometheus in the Underworld.’ Camus is perhaps most famous for his use of Sisyphus as a metaphor, but it’s Prometheus, his humanism, and his open rebellion against the gods that Camus saw as a much more fruitful model for human behaviour. That is correct. His punishment is one of the most gruesome in Greek myths. He’s chained to a rock where, each morning, an eagle tears out his liver. To aid mankind, to take them out of the darkness the gods would have condemned them to. Yes. I would argue that Jean Tarrou in The Plague is someone whom Camus would think of as a modern-day rebel or Prometheus, taking on these enormous risks, not for his own benefit, not for this notion of heroism, but just for the simple reason of wanting to save as many souls as he can. That’s certainly my interpretation of Camus. There’s a line at the very end of The Plague where he writes that though a final victory and sainthood are impossibilities, it is enough to refuse “to bow down to pestilences and strive their utmost to be healers.” Yes, very much so. And I think that distinction is part of what led to the feud between Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, because Camus was adamant that the idea was not just merely to turn the weapons back on those who would harm us."

"Yes. This ties in quite well. This is the last book, but by no means the least. I am choosing The Rebel . It’s written that way. This is a decidedly philosophical text, in which he’s articulating this notion of rebellion, and how we’re to understand our place in the world and how to respond to that. This is Camus’ most academic book. It’s his attempt to make sense of the historical, political, and literary influences that have shaped our world, and how they inform our values in an attempt to figure out where we must go next. This is not as lyrical a book as any of the others, although there’s a chapter at the end where he talks about transcending nihilism that is quite powerful and he’s at his most eloquent. He says that “real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present and the task that before us is to transcend nihilism and to imbue meaning back into the world. But the challenge is that few of us know that that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.” Yes. That is a lot of what he’s writing about in The Rebel : that just to negate how the world is or just to reject it doesn’t accomplish anything; that negation itself serves no function. It’s sort-of cynical and it’s sort-of nihilistic in its own way and it doesn’t transcend the contradiction of our reality the way that the existentialists wanted to think that they do. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . For Camus, what was really important is that we have to create an alternative, we have to be able to move past the master-slave dialectical way of understanding the world and create a way of relating to one another that just hasn’t been achieved before, and not simply change places between oppressor and oppressed. I almost feel bad for how frequently I say this isn’t my favourite of Camus novels, though it’s certainly very good. I left it off because I think there’s so much more to Camus’ thought than the absurdity he’s most known for. In fact, in a footnote that accompanies the essay, ‘The Enigma’, in the Lyrical and Critical Essay s, Philip Thody writes that Camus himself was frustrated with the French critics and a public that could not see his thought had evolved beyond what was contained in The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus . As I mentioned earlier, the absurd for Camus was just a starting point. I’m much more interested in where we should go from there, how we respond to it rather than surrender to it, and what sort of alternative ways of living we could create. The Plague is like an extended universe of Camus’ novels because there seem to be references to all of the different characters in there. I don’t know how intentional that was, or how much of that is his subconscious, with themes and situations overlapping as he’s writing. That’s fair and I went back and forth about leaving The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider off the list for exactly this reason. But if the absurd is to be a point of departure as Camus intended, there are other works of his that deserve our attention. Yes. I would recommend the Oliver Todd biography . It’s by far the most comprehensive that I’ve encountered so far. But, as a small note on that, I’ve recently received the Germaine Brée biography, which was begun while he was still alive, and it has some very interesting interpretations of Camus’ life. The Germaine Brée book was begun while Camus was still alive and then had to be reformatted after his death and recontextualized. The book that you’re thinking about, La Mort de Camus , was written by an Italian scholar, Giovanni Catelli, arguing that Camus’ death was the result of a KGB plot. I’m not terribly persuaded by it. Right. The author of that book is arguing that the road that they were on was completely straight and there was no reason for the car to have swerved and that there are indications, based on analysis of the engine parts, that maybe it had been tampered with a little bit. But, if you know anything about Camus, it doesn’t strain credulity to think that, before he got into the car, he and his editor had had a few drinks and that they may have been goofing around while they were driving. It’s not surprising to me or not impossible, given what I know of him, that he might be a little reckless."