The Complete Notebooks - by Albert Camus (Hardcover)

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 offer 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 offer 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 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"--

Book Synopsis

The first complete translation of Albert Camus's personal notebooks written between 1933 and 1959, published for the first time in one comprehensive volume.

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 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.

Review Quotes

"The Complete Notebooks traces Camus's development from a budding writer in colonial Algeria to a journalist of the French Resistance to a revered public intellectual. (He died in a 1960 car crash.) Here we find early drafts of passages that would later appear in his published work, as well as ideas for various other projects, some pursued and some abandoned. In late 1938 he recorded some thoughts about suicide and hopelessness--themes he would explore in his 1942 essay, 'The Myth of Sisyphus.'"

--Benjamin Shull "Wall Street Journal"

"Now, more than ever, we need the intellectual and imaginative resources to work out how best to live together without appealing to political ideologies, religious doctrines, or philosophical systems. The work of Albert Camus offers one such resource, but to benefit from this requires a wholesale reevaluation of his life and work, his reception and reputation. Ryan Bloom's excellent and necessary translation of The Complete Notebooks may finally offer a corrective."

-- "The Los Angeles Review of Books"

"What these journals do contain are philosophical notes for the novels published during [Camus's] lifetime --The Stranger, The Plague and The Fall--books that are sui generis explorations not just of the absurdity of existence but of isolation, guilt, redemption and resilience. They're told with clarity and resounding depth."

-- "The New York Times"

"[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."-- "Literary Review"

"If you want to see what occupies a philosophical novelist in his off-hours, we now have The Complete Notebooks of Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom, presented in a single-volume format for the first time in English. The translation itself is sharp yet sensitive, and the perceptive footnotes will be appreciated even by readers fluent in French."

-- "The New Criterion"

"Like all great academic editions, Ryan Bloom's The Complete Notebooks is not merely a catalogue of Camus' private writings: it is a fascinating network map of Camus' life, work and ideas."

-- "Engelsberg Ideas"

"To read Albert Camus's Notebooks-comprehensive, newly translated and expertly annotated by Ryan Bloom-is to enter the engine room of the writer's mind and to glimpse its complex workings and components stripped back to their essentials. . . . The Notebooks bring to mind the fertile chaos of an artist's studio. . . Camus's published essays and novels are here in fragmentary form, as yet unshaped but evolving; and Bloom's invaluable footnotes help us track the connections, trace the echoes and nail familiar phrases that ambush us from time to time."

-- "The Spectator"

"[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."

-- "Open Letters Review"

"'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."-- "David Carroll, author of "Albert Camus the Algerian""

"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."-- "Robert Zaretsky, author of "Victories Never Last""

"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."-- "Alice Kaplan, author of "Looking for "'The Stranger'" and coauthor of "States of Plague""

"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."-- "Anne H. Quinney, University of Mississippi"

"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."

-- "Kirkus Reviews"

"An intimate glimpse into the psyche of a widely admired writer."--Praise for Ryan Bloom's translation of Camus's "Travels in the Americas" "The Wall Street Journal"

"An elegant new translation."--Praise for Ryan Bloom's translation of Camus's "Travels in the Americas" "London Review of Books"

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.