The Complete Notebooks

by Albert Camus, Ryan Bloom (Translator)

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 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 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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

712 pages, Hardcover

Published December 11, 2025

About the author

Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel Prize of 1957 for literature.

Origin and his experiences of this representative of non-metropolitan literature in the 1930s dominated influences in his thought and work.

He also adapted plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Requiem for a Nun of William Faulkner. One may trace his enjoyment of the theater back to his membership in l'Equipe, an Algerian group, whose "collective creation" Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.

Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest, he came at the age of 25 years in 1938; only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation served as a columnist for the newspaper Combat.

The essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942, expounds notion of acceptance of the absurd of Camus with "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction."
Meursault, central character of L'Étranger (The Stranger), 1942, illustrates much of this essay: man as the nauseated victim of the absurd orthodoxy of habit, later - when the young killer faces execution - tempted by despair, hope, and salvation.

Besides his fiction and essays, Camus very actively produced plays in the theater (e.g., Caligula, 1944).

The time demanded his response, chiefly in his activities, but in 1947, Camus retired from political journalism.

Doctor Rieux of La Peste (The Plague), 1947, who tirelessly attends the plague-stricken citizens of Oran, enacts the revolt against a world of the absurd and of injustice, and confirms words: "We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them."

People also well know La Chute (The Fall), work of Camus in 1956.

Camus authored L'Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom) in 1957. His austere search for moral order found its aesthetic correlative in the classicism of his art. He styled of great purity, intense concentration, and rationality.

Camus died at the age of 46 years in a car accident near Sens in le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin.

Chinese 阿尔贝·加缪

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only is the new translation of Camus' notebooks excellent, but they include sections left out from the original translations like his time in South America as well as some early "lost" notebooks discovered posthumously. There is too much vital material to be found within these notebooks to mention here. But one thing I find particularly interesting is Camus' reflection on writing and using different forms of writing to express his ideas. I have always felt that one form alone (e.g. the essay, poetry, drama, etc.) is not enough to express one's ideas. Different forms of writing are needed to better express differently modalities of thought. Early on in the notebooks, he writes, "Sometimes I have to write things that are partly beyond me, but which, for that very reason, prove there are things in me that are greater than me," a sentiment I think most writers would recognize. Much writing, the best forms, is the writer trying to think beyond himself.

It was also useful seeing Camus work through ideas in the notebooks, trying out sentences and paragraphs that would be incorporated into novels, stories, essays, and drama. It is also interesting observing how he struggled with writing and its relevancy until very late in his life-- despite his numerous successes and winning the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1957, he worries about writing for a society "that doesn't read us, a bourgeoisie that, in a given year, peruses the papers and two trendy books. In reality, a creator these days can only be a solitary prophet, inhabited by, consumed by a limitless creation." All the more true in the days of platform capitalism and "social" media. He is correct that writing is a form of "empty asceticism," withdrawing you from the world and things you most likely rather be doing.

One final thing: his passion for the sea and swimming is clearly related in the notebook. Camus has to be one of the best writers in expressing the allure of the ocean, the beach, the sea. He writes about this consistently throughout his life, something I deeply relate to:
The surface of the water is barely illuminated, but you can feel the depths of its darkness. That's how the sea is and that's why I love it. The call of life and an invitation to death."

He died far too young. But at least we have these vital notebooks to get a greater sense of the processes that informed Camus' writing and some insights into his outlooks on life and death.