The Complete Notebooks of Camus

The Complete Notebooks

By Albert Camus

Translated from the French by Ryan Bloom

University of Chicago Press 2025

“When we read intimate works, such as a writer’s notebooks or letters,” writes Ryan Bloom in the Translator’s Preface to his masterful new English-language translation of the little carnets, the notebooks Albert Camus kept from 1933 to 1959, “we tend to assume that we’re encountering them in the raw, as they were originally written.”

But as Bloom quickly makes clear, although there might be some kind of intimacy in these pages, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, not a single individual letter in the alphabet, that’s raw. Much like the “writer’s notebook” Somerset Maugham brought out in the middle of the 20th century, these notebooks of Camus are exact opposite of spontaneous or unrehearsed. Not only did Camus himself go in and change earlier entries to conform to later versions of himself, but all along the way (and for the two notebooks that weren’t typed up in his lifetime), plenty of other people were fussing with those entries. The notebooks were probably typed by his secretary Suzanne Agnely, who was accustomed to grappling with this author’s atrocious handwriting but hardly infallible at it, and they were further edited by his wife Francine and his friend Roger Quilliot. Gaps have been filled in. Guesses have been made about lacunae. And Camus at 42 has no hesitation in fixing Camus at 22. The end result is as much a Rorschach Test as it is a raw document.

Even so, Bloom’s book is bottomlessly hypnotic. Writing about Camus’s masterpiece, William Boyd commented, “It remains enduringly modern in spirit. As does its author,” and maybe the eternal appeal of Camus really does boil down to such a simple essence. 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.

“When I was young, I asked people for more than they could give: everlasting friendship, a permanent emotion,” he writes in his early 20s, already sounding old. “Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: companionship, plain and simple. And then their emotions, their friendship, their noble gesture, in my eyes, they maintain the full value as the miracles they are.” And ten years later, in 1942, the very year of his literary apotheosis, he's reflecting on the writing world as though he’d been revered for a century: “The first thing for writers to learn is how to transpose what they feel into what they want to make felt. The first few times they succeed by chance. But after that talent has to take the place of chance,” an entry goes. “So, then there’s an element of luck at the root of genius.”

Bloom does a smoothly magnificent job at not only rendering all this into English but rendering its context comprehensible through a great mass of footnotes and other supporting material, all of it grounded in excellent sourcework, from Oliver Todd’s definitive Albert Camus: Une Vie to the obsessively detailed studies of Hiroyuki Takatsuka to Raymond Gay-Grosier’s extensive notes for the Pléiade edition of the Notebooks. And he explains his own editorial approach (another cook for the stew!): “When neither outside source nor Camus’s own writing seem to shed light on an enigmatic entry, or when an entry is written in such a way as to leave room for possible confusion,” he writes, “the translation given leans slightly in the direction of readability, filling in the occasional dropped article, adding the occasional comma, and, in rare cases, providing a touch of clarification.”

Of course, there will still be odd little sticking points. When Camus describes a character as having “that white blouse rolled up on those golden arms, her hair loose, her feet unadorned, and her face leading the way,” Bloom adds a footnote: “This las phrase, visage de proue, literally “face of a ship’s prow,” is used figuratively to mean that someone is a “leading light” or that something is a “flagship” item,” and probably he’s as aware as anybody that neither “leading light” nor especially “flagship” is quite right here. Given the weird cheesecloth perversity of the French language, some of these infelicities are doubtless unavoidable. The overall feeling is of careful, enormously respectful curation, which is the important thing.

Clive James once remarked of Camus that “he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are,” and this feeling pervades even this excellent English-language rendition of the notebooks. 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.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News