One of the pleasures of this edition of Albert Camus’s late-life notebooks is in skipping around: Certainly, they can be read straight through, but the compact philosophical aphorisms sprinkled among the longer passages — which include fascinating drafts of letters to friends — encourage a hopscotcher’s approach. What runs from start to finish is an unrelieved moral tension that is the hallmark of all of Camus’s output: “Fear of my trade and my vocation. Faithful, there is ruin; faithless, there is nothing.”
Notebooks: 1951–1959
Albert Camus
Ivan R. Dee
Out now
$27.50
