Notebooks, 1935-1942: Volume 1
The first of three volumes of Albert Camus's notebooks, covering the years before he was famous enough to be dangerous. Here he sketches ideas for future books, copies passages he is reading, and records his reactions to Algeria, the war, women, solitude, and the weather. The entries are uneven by design: some are polished vignettes, others are fragments that only make sense in retrospect. Read together, they form an intellectual autobiography written in real time, without the smoothing that memoir usually demands. Camus is still working out who he is, which is more interesting than the finished portrait. Ideal reader: the writer who keeps a notebook full of promises, or the reader who wants to watch a moral style being assembled sentence by sentence.
