About the Book
The first complete translation of Albert Camus's personal notebooks written between 1933 and 1959, including new material never before published in English.
Throughout his career, French writer and philosopher Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks that offers an unrivaled glimpse into the writer at his most personal and reflective. These notebooks contain his thoughts on politics, solitude, personal failings and regrets, his travels, and his relationships with friends and rivals. They also provide insight into his process as a thinker—his frustrations, his ideas for novels and plays (some pursued and others abandoned), his routines, his aspirations, and his self-recriminations.
For Camus devotees, there is no more intimate experience than reading these notebooks. On the one hand, his fallibility is on full display: He is irritated by mediocrity, frustrated with his health, plagued by insomnia, and miserable about life's petty necessities. Yet, he is also intensely curious and observant, sometimes moved to rapture by landscapes and people. Readers will experience the bounty of Camus's philosophical imagination and will witness firsthand how his ideas take shape. The notebooks contain drafts of letters to friends and recorded reflections on the compromises that being in the world demands.
This publication marks the first time Camus's complete notebooks have been published in one comprehensive volume. Expertly and movingly translated by Ryan Bloom with extensive footnotes contextualizing the entries, The Complete Notebooks will remain a literary treasure for years to come.
Table of Contents:
Translator’s Introduction
Notebook I: May 1935–September 1937
Notebook II: September 1937–April 1939
Notebook III: April 1939–February 1942
Notebook IV: January 1942–September 1945
Notebook V: September 1945–April 1948
Notebook VI: April 1948–June 1949
Travels in South America: June–August 1949
Notebook VI: September 1949–March 1951
Notebook VII: March 1951–December 1953
Notebook VIII: December 1953–July 1958 Drafts and Notes Tucked in Notebook VIII Notebook IX: July 1958–
Appendix I. The First Notebook: 1933
Appendix II. The Oran Notebook: March 1938–August 1942
Index
About the Author :
Albert Camus (1913–60) was a French philosopher, writer, and journalist and one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century letters. His widely read and translated works include the novels The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall and the philosophical texts The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Ryan Bloom is a literary translator, fiction writer, and essayist from Washington, DC. His translations of Camus’s work include Caligula and Three Other Plays; Travels in the Americas; The First Man: The Graphic Novel; and Notebooks 1951–1959. He is a 2024–2025 Guggenheim Fellow and a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University.
Review :
“Now complete for the first time, in a fluent English translation…The inner life of a great absurdist, with lessons for us in times of turmoil.”
“[Camus's] wry, self-deprecating tone courses through his notebooks, the same natural gift for aphorisms. The notebooks were published in French between 1962 and 1989. . . Now, they have been published for the first time in a single volume, beautifully translated by the author and scholar Ryan Bloom. . . . It’s brilliant writing – febrile, passionate, moving. Bloom’s is also a brilliant translation. But don’t take it from me. Camus is such a pro that, from beyond the grave, he manages to come up with the perfect blurb. In 1942, in Saint-Etienne, he writes: ‘Do you love ideas – passionately, pulse pounding? Does the idea keep you up at night?’ Well, do you? Does it? If so, read this book.”
“[A] masterful new English-language translation. . . . Bloom’s book is bottomlessly hypnotic. . . Through some combination of his glamorous looks, his sharp mind, and his theatric early death, Camus seems always new, always pointed. Watching the odd jumps and morose preoccupations of his mind in these notebooks, even under layers of author revision and translator judgement calls, is fascinating. . . . Far from being the ad hoc jottings of a busy genius, they are elaborately, almost unbearably stage-managed, an author attempting to re-negotiate the narrative of his own past. With most authors, this would be repulsively egotistical. But this is Camus, so we read on, hooked to the page.”
“In 1935, soon after his first marriage, Camus began to jot down his insights in notebooks that would nourish every project to come. For anyone who wants to understand Camus’s creative process, these notebooks are essential. Guidebooks, outlines, sketches of characters and scenes, arguments with the world and with himself, they show an admirable consistency of tone and purpose from the fledgling writer of the 1930s to the international celebrity of the 1950s. Until this edition, the notebooks existed in several uneven translations. Now, thanks to Ryan Bloom’s tour de force, English-language readers have access to the inner voice of the writer-at-work.”
“In this fluently translated and brilliantly annotated edition of Camus’s notebooks, Bloom has done us a great service. In our own era of political violence and moral confusion, the bracing clarity and stubborn honesty of Camus’s reflections on his own troubled times could not be more welcome.”
“‘I’m a writer. It’s not me but the pen that thinks, remembers, or discovers,’ writes Albert Camus in one of the many intriguing entries of his notebooks, admirably translated into English and annotated by Ryan Bloom. Camus’s notebooks reveal the kernels of his evolving literary ideals and political positions during some of the most crucial moments of mid-twentieth-century European history. Bloom’s meticulously researched footnotes not only explain the historical contexts of the notes but also indicate the developed, rewritten form these initial pen scratchings take in Camus’s completed novels and political essays, thus giving us an excellent sense of the complexity of his (re)writing and (re)thinking processes. Camus’s pen has never been better served in English than in this volume.”
“What Bloom has accomplished in The Complete Notebooks—not only assembling the disparate fragments, handwritten and typed, retyped, then remastered by Camus himself, but also exposing the points at which Camus self-edits—is an astonishing feat and will be an enduring gift to the community of Camus’s readers, present and future. Only an exceptionally discerning eye for the layers of details found across multiple versions can reveal the very process of creation that brings readers closer to what Camus might have been thinking at the time. Those dedicated to following the evolution of Camus’s singular thought and style will be thrilled to discover this expertly translated volume of those thoughts and ideas collected, finally, in one place.”
“An intimate glimpse into the psyche of a widely admired writer.”
“An elegant new translation.”
