How can we live in a meaningless world? Is there any hope of happiness, when our existence is fundamentally absurd and we must succumb to ‘revolting death’? Should we even bother with life, or just abandon the quest? These are the questions to which Albert Camus returns over and over again in his fiction, essays and plays. 

Camus was born in 1913 and brought up in working-class Algiers. His father was killed in 1914 at the Battle of the Marne. Camus was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of seventeen, yet he is often associated with sporting prowess and football in particular. He was a journalist first in Algiers and then in Paris, becoming editor-in-chief of the French Resistance newspaper Combat. After an unhappy first marriage, he married the musician and mathematician Francine Faure, who gave birth to twins. During his relatively brief but extraordinary life, Camus wrote seminal philosophical essays such as Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942;The Myth of Sisyphus) and L’Homme révolté (1951;The Rebel) and also-seminal novels such as L’Etranger (1942;The Outsider), La Peste (1947;The Plague) and La Chute (1956;The Fall). Camus opposed political violence and the utopian idea that the ends justify the means. He embraced absurdism, rejected nihilism, embraced then rejected Sartre, smoked a million Gauloises and received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1945, he signed a petition lobbying for the commutation of a death sentence served on the collaborationist Robert Brasillach, a writer he despised. During the Algerian War of Independence, he received death threats from both sides. In 1960, at the age of forty-six, he was killed in a car crash. He was carrying a return train ticket at the time. As many (including Sartre) have pointed out, the greatest proponent of absurdism suffered an absurd death.

There’s a surreal television interview with Camus at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris, during a football match between Racing Club de Paris and AS Monaco. It’s 1957 and Camus has recently won the Nobel Prize. The interviewer asks for a few thoughts from Camus on why he won. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ says Camus. ‘I’m not privy to the secrets of the Swedish Academy. But there are two or three writers who deserved the prize before me.’ He’s also invited to criticise the Racing Club goalkeeper. A former goalkeeper himself (for the Racing Universitaire d’Alger), Camus says, ‘Don’t blame him. If you were out there in the middle you’d realise how difficult it is.’ Notable aspects of this interview are: Camus’s diffident charm, how he never stops watching the game, how he seems more interested in football than in speaking of the Nobel. The same wry, self-deprecating tone courses through his notebooks, the same natural gift for aphorisms. The notebooks were published in French between 1962 and 1989; previous English translations have appeared, including by Philip Thody. Now, they have been published for the first time in a single volume, beautifully translated by the author and scholar Ryan Bloom. 

At the start, Camus is a young man of twenty-five. It’s 1937; he’s publishing his first collection of essays, L’Envers et l’endroit (Betwixt and Between). He scribbles down informal observations, reflections, quotations from other authors – a habit he maintains for the rest of his life. (These notebooks encompass the years 1935 to 1958.) War breaks out. Camus is in Algiers, working for Alger Républicain. His brother Lucien is called up; Camus is rejected on account of his tuberculosis. For Camus, war is a symptom of a deeper malady: ‘That this catastrophe is fundamentally absurd doesn’t change anything about it, rather it generalises the somewhat more fundamental absurdity of life.’ Yet, Camus maintains, it’s ‘futile to try to disengage … You collaborate or you combat.’ How to avoid succumbing to nihilism? How to act when all actions may be futile? How to be happy, in brief attenuated moments, even? In one entry, a ‘Letter to a Man Without Hope’, Camus writes: ‘We need to understand that war is waged as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the hopelessness of those who repudiate it with all their soul.’ Throughout his notebooks, Camus struggles with feelings of ‘profound disgust with all society’, with the ‘servile century’, with the ‘temptation to run away’. But he never does. After the war, in 1951, he writes: ‘art’s grandeur doesn’t come from hanging above everything. On the contrary, it comes from being immersed in everything.’

The writing is sometimes aphoristic, sometimes expansive and always (of course) philosophical. There are richly sensuous descriptions of nature, witty aperçus, competitive takedowns of his rivals, moments of angst. Camus believes in the novel as a political and philosophical enterprise. Novels deal in words and fictional realities (a paradox) created by words. How, then, do we describe fictional and actual realities, how do we distinguish one from the other? Who decides? While working on L’Etranger, Camus writes: ‘Stranger – who can know what the word means?’ And: ‘Everything is strange to me, everything … What am I doing here, what rhyme or reason is there for these gestures, these similes?’ Other concerns include the seductions of habit: how can we avoid tumbling into received ways of thinking and actual lies, inadvertent or deliberate? For Camus, as he puts it first in the notebooks and later in L’Homme révolté: ‘Freedom is the right not to lie.’ By freedom he also means a liberation from antinomies, from being forced ‘to choose to be victim or executioner – and nothing else’. Throughout his work, throughout these notebooks, Camus rejects the ‘naivete of the … intellectual who believes a person has to be inflexible to flex their intellect’. 

Some of the above sounds like Orwell, and there are similarities between the two authors. Both refused adamantine positions, both opposed fascism and communism, both experienced some heat from their peers for these positions. As Bloom writes, Camus came to see the French Communist Party and its intellectual supporters as ‘apologists for premeditated, organised, rationalised murder’. This ended his friendship with Sartre, their quarrel coming after the publication of L’Homme révolté in 1951. In one of his many illuminating footnotes, Bloom describes how, in February 1945, Orwell waited for Camus in Les Deux Magots in Paris. But Camus had been felled by one of his recurring bouts of tuberculosis, so the two men never met. If only. If only Camus had used his return train ticket on 4 January 1960. The notebooks are full of such shadows, such possibilities. The play about Don Juan that Camus planned all his life but never wrote. The original notebooks, as Camus first wrote them, before they were redrafted. In his introduction, Bloom explains that Camus was responsible for many but not all of these second-pass edits; further changes were made by his wife, Francine, and a friend, Roger Quilliot. Some edits are minor, some more substantial; passages are reordered, suggesting a clear, determined evolution of works such as La Mort heureuse (1936–8; published 1971; A Happy Death). Some entries are redacted entirely. 

Perhaps this is one more case of an imaginative author inventing not only their novels but also their writerly persona. Yet, as Bloom points out, Camus also constantly drafted and redrafted his main works. In his notebooks he is tormented by doubt and self-criticism. He thinks about giving up writing. What’s the point? he asks. Not just in a general absurdist way, but with a more specific anxiety about reception: 

I’ve always believed creation is a dialogue. But, with whom? Our literary society whose driving precept is second-rate spite, where offense takes the place of a critical method? Society as a whole? A population that doesn’t read us … that, in a given year, peruses the papers and two trendy books. 

Camus also deserves a shadow prize for his despondent response to the news that he has won the Nobel: ‘strange feeling of overwhelming weight and melancholy’. Yet on he goes, telling himself to do better next time. In 1958, shortly before his death, Camus is to be found wandering ‘amid the wreckage’, having ‘lived my whole life in a sort of lie’, preparing once more to ‘rebuild a truth’. 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.