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Albert Camus: Elements of a Life
"Like many others of my generation, I first read Camus in high school. I carried him in my backpack while traveling across Europe, I carried him into (and out of) relationships, and I carried him into (and out of) difficult periods of my life. More recently, I have carried him into university classes that I have taught, coming out of them with a renewed appreciation of his art. To be sure, my idea of Camus thirty years ago scarcely resembles my idea of him today. While my admiration and attachment to his writings remain as great as they were long ago, the reasons are more complicated and critical." Robert Zaretsky
On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus was dining in a small restaurant on Paris's Left Bank when a waiter approached him with news: the radio had just announced that Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus insisted that a mistake had been made and that others were far more deserving of the honor than he. Yet Camus was already recognized around the world as the voice of a generation a status he had achieved with dizzying speed. He published his first novel, The Stranger, in 1942 and emerged from the war as the spokesperson for the Resistance and, although he consistently rejected the label, for existentialism. Subsequent works of fiction (including the novels The Plague and The Fall), philosophy (notably, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel), drama, and social criticism secured his literary and intellectual reputation. And then on January 4, 1960, three years after accepting the Nobel Prize, he was killed in a car accident.
In a book distinguished by clarity and passion, Robert Zaretsky considers why Albert Camus mattered in his own lifetime and continues to matter today, focusing on key moments that shaped Camus's development as a writer, a public intellectual, and a man. Each chapter is devoted to a specific event: Camus's visit to Kabylia in 1939 to report on the conditions of the local Berber tribes; his decision in 1945 to sign a petition to commute the death sentence of collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach; his famous quarrel with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 over the nature of communism; and his silence about the war in Algeria in 1956. Both engaged and engaging, Albert Camus: Elements of a Life is a searching companion to a profoundly moral and lucid writer whose works provide a guide for those perplexed by the absurdity of the human condition and the world's resistance to meaning.
On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus was dining in a small restaurant on Paris's Left Bank when a waiter approached him with news: the radio had just announced that Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus insisted that a mistake had been made and that others were far more deserving of the honor than he. Yet Camus was already recognized around the world as the voice of a generation a status he had achieved with dizzying speed. He published his first novel, The Stranger, in 1942 and emerged from the war as the spokesperson for the Resistance and, although he consistently rejected the label, for existentialism. Subsequent works of fiction (including the novels The Plague and The Fall), philosophy (notably, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel), drama, and social criticism secured his literary and intellectual reputation. And then on January 4, 1960, three years after accepting the Nobel Prize, he was killed in a car accident.
In a book distinguished by clarity and passion, Robert Zaretsky considers why Albert Camus mattered in his own lifetime and continues to matter today, focusing on key moments that shaped Camus's development as a writer, a public intellectual, and a man. Each chapter is devoted to a specific event: Camus's visit to Kabylia in 1939 to report on the conditions of the local Berber tribes; his decision in 1945 to sign a petition to commute the death sentence of collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach; his famous quarrel with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 over the nature of communism; and his silence about the war in Algeria in 1956. Both engaged and engaging, Albert Camus: Elements of a Life is a searching companion to a profoundly moral and lucid writer whose works provide a guide for those perplexed by the absurdity of the human condition and the world's resistance to meaning.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
27 people are currently reading
461 people want to read
About the author
Robert Zaretsky
17 books47 followersRobert Zaretsky is a literary biographer and historian of France. He is Professor of Humanities at the Honors College, University of Houston, and the author of many books, including A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning and Boswell’s Enlightenment. Zaretsky is the history editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, a regular columnist for The Forward, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Foreign Policy.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
January 27, 2025
I'm always pleased to learn more about one of my heroes. I plan to one day make a history podcast about historical figures. Each episode will be a different famous name. The first episode might have to be Camus.
April 28, 2013
This should be a four really, there were moments of "what Camus meant to say was" from the author, which I found distracting, but I was swept up by the brilliant epilogue and the way that the book finished so that marking it down was merely nit-picking.
I loved the form that the author chose for his work, that of selecting a crucial moment from Camus' life for each of the four chapters; it gave focus to an otherwise unwieldy subject. Besides which, I've read several books on Camus and I never really felt as close to the man and his philosophical development as I do after reading this.
Another reviewer has mentioned that it's far too short of a book and I agree, I would have liked to carry on reading, which I guess is the sign of a good book anyway.
I loved the form that the author chose for his work, that of selecting a crucial moment from Camus' life for each of the four chapters; it gave focus to an otherwise unwieldy subject. Besides which, I've read several books on Camus and I never really felt as close to the man and his philosophical development as I do after reading this.
Another reviewer has mentioned that it's far too short of a book and I agree, I would have liked to carry on reading, which I guess is the sign of a good book anyway.
April 14, 2026
The elements of Camus’ life looked at here are generally his activism in attempting to bring ethics and politics closer together in the public sphere and key biographical episodes and experiences that informed his outlook. The novel which most explores these and which in turn is most discussed in this book is The Plague.
Many details, influential figures, quotes and exchanges are traced beginning from his childhood, then his early journalism, theatre and letters, through his participation in the Resistance, onto the fallout with Sartre and De Bouvoir which became solidified following the publication of The Rebel and the Franco-Algerian war.
It’s thoroughly researched and well-presented in its exploration of the details of Camus’ motivation at various points in his life and his own struggles with setting a high bar of sincerity, transparency and a quest for common ground of humanity.
Many details, influential figures, quotes and exchanges are traced beginning from his childhood, then his early journalism, theatre and letters, through his participation in the Resistance, onto the fallout with Sartre and De Bouvoir which became solidified following the publication of The Rebel and the Franco-Algerian war.
It’s thoroughly researched and well-presented in its exploration of the details of Camus’ motivation at various points in his life and his own struggles with setting a high bar of sincerity, transparency and a quest for common ground of humanity.
February 18, 2020
Camus is ...... Hot
Usually I don't read biographies, esp not for dead old philosophers but this was ok
Good length for someone just casually interested in Camus as a person and has encountered his ideas b4
I liked this book. I thought it was ok. Not a long-time fave but it was ok
Usually I don't read biographies, esp not for dead old philosophers but this was ok
Good length for someone just casually interested in Camus as a person and has encountered his ideas b4
I liked this book. I thought it was ok. Not a long-time fave but it was ok
March 28, 2026
Albert Camus: Elements of a Life
Zaretsky Robert
our morality and our humanism seem easily learned but scarcely earned.
*****
It is the human being’s confrontation with the universe, not something inherent to the universe itself, that leads to absurdity.
*****
“All I can hope to do,” he said shortly after World War II, “is show that generous forms of behavior can be engendered even in a world without God and that man alone in the universe can still create his own values. That is, in my opinion, the sole problem posed by our era.”
*****
The Mediterranean is a philosophical no less than a physical state, elevated by Camus to the symbol of an ancient world of human values and thought, profane, clasping the earth, a world he erected against the overreaching and dry ideologies he associated with the gray landscapes of urban Europe.
*****
For Camus, the most overpowering memory of childhood was of silence. The grandmother, Catherine Sintes, a widow, bitter and violent, was unlettered and laconic; with Camus and his brother, Lucien, she often expressed herself with slaps and whippings rather than words. Uncle Etienne had been mute until his early teens; after an operation, he was able to speak, but only haltingly and simply, communicating “as much by onomatopoeic sounds and gestures as with the hundred-odd words at his disposal.”19 And his mother, also named Catherine, was illiterate and partly deaf. According to a family tradition, Catherine Sintes had been perfectly at ease speaking as a young woman; it was only in 1914, after she received news of the death of her husband, that her speech was hobbled.
It was when she lost her husband and her tongue that Catherine Camus lost what little freedom she had had. With the infant Albert and the toddler Lucien, she moved back in with her mother in Belcourt. She spent the rest of her life working long hours as a cleaning woman, returning to a home ruled by a harsh matriarch and to two sons whom she loved but was scarcely able to protect, much less nurture. When the grandmother grabbed her whip and began to beat one of the children, Catherine Sintes stood to one side, pleading only that she not strike him on the head. She was there, yet as elusive as the father Camus never knew; she was indispensable, but silent like the world that refused to surrender meaning; she filled her son’s life, though the nature of her presence was forever an enigma.
*****
Even more than the sea, the figure of the silent mother occupies the center of Camus’s writings
*****
Silence, in short, is never merely physical or aural. For Camus, it is also metaphysical and ethical.
*****
Shortly before his death, he described his literary goal: to write a book at whose center would be “the admirable silence of a mother and one man’s effort to rediscover a justice or a love to match this silence.”
*****
Camus, like Diderot, believed in the moral potential of theater. This conviction helps explain the weakness of his theatrical pieces, which are often mired in a kind of ethical didacticism.
*****
In political terms, his despair was especially deep, if only because of the gap between the ideals of the French republic and the reality of Kabylia.
*****
Camus left for Paris in 1939. The government had helped ensure that no one in Algiers would hire him.
*****
They argue that from the place of individual revolt against an absurd world staked out by The Stranger, he moves to the high moral ground of collective resistance in The Plague. But the high ground was already reached in the earlier novel.
*****
As Conor Cruise O’Brien puts it, “the reader does not quite feel that Meursault has killed a man. He has killed an Arab.”13 But is it so simple? Is it instead possible that Meursault himself has been turned into an “Arab”—namely, a character deprived of his humanity? As David Carroll suggests, Meursault is gradually stripped of everything that identifies him as an individual human being.
*****
By 1944, the French police had arrested and deported there more than seventy-five thousand Jews, refugees and citizens alike. By war’s end, fewer than two thousand were still alive.
*****
Meursault’s transformation into the “Other” mirrors in unsettling ways the transformation of the French Jewish community under Vichy.
*****
How are we to act—what are we to do—in a world shorn of God or meaning? The answer, Camus concluded, lay in the solidarity of human beings.
*****
As André Trocmé, the village minister, told the police officer who demanded to know the whereabouts of the refugee Jews: “We do not know what a Jew is. We know only men.”
*****
Even closer to Trocmé’s blunt assertion is the observation Camus made in his notebook during the same period: “The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.”
*****
The question now became how best to serve this love. The answer for Camus arrived in 1943 when Pascal Pia, the former editor in chief of Alger-Républicain, who had assumed the same function at Combat, invited Camus to join the paper. Working at first from nearby Lyons, then soon after in Paris, where he moved toward the end of 1943, Camus helped lay out the pages for the paper, while also editing and writing. In early June 1944, when Pia left the paper to take on new responsibilities in the Resistance, Camus replaced him. By then, more than 300,000 copies of a single issue were being printed, reaching a far greater audience than Alger-Républicain ever did.
When France was liberated, Combat was widely seen as the voice of the Resistance. Yet that voice grew hesitant during the confused and complex period called the épuration, or purge. Four years of increasingly brutal occupation had sowed the seeds for revenge. But the nature of the harvest remained unclear.
*****
The absence of meaning is not a call to despair or an invitation to leap joyfully into the abyss. Instead, the world’s stubborn silence leads us to acknowledge our common predicament and spurs us to rebel against it.
*****
Rather than “mutilating” man, as the Nazis did, we must safeguard the ideal of justice that man alone is capable of conceiving
*****
Pushed by the overwhelming pressures of justice, Camus condemned a man to death. It was a decision that clashed with all the values he had once held and a decision he would soon regret.
*****
Sartre and his colleagues had set themselves a formidable task: to depict as honestly as possible the horrors of communism, yet frame them so as “to be left with an experience and a project worthy of their dreams and defensible in their own philosophical and ethical language.”
*****
As his Letters to a German Friend already announced, the true rebel acts in full knowledge that there will be no ultimate vindication or justification.
*****
During the war, Camus grew more convinced than ever that existentialism was a diagnosis mistaken by many for a cure. By itself, it was, quite simply, “zero point,” a datum of existence that “teaches nothing.”47 The experience of liberation only confirmed this belief: the existentialist was right to affirm the existence of the absurd but wrong to propose that we remain there. “Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience,” he insisted, but “it should not become a dead end.”
*****
Just as recognizing a physical illness leads to the search for a cure, recognizing the absurdity of our lives leads to revolt. And the idea of revolt, Camus concluded, “could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence.”
*****
His parting words were grim: “The conditions under which daily newspapers operate have evolved to the point where only large circulation papers can break even. I leave it to readers to ponder what this law of economics portends for freedom of thought.
*****
The Rebel is an essay on the necessity of being impolite.
*****
73From the recognition of absurdity comes revolt; and from revolt comes the recognition that we are not alone.
*****
the act of rebellion reveals certain moral limits common to all human beings.
*****
The Melian offer of friendship to Athens exemplifies the core of Camus’s ethical thought: the slave does not deny his master as a fellow human being; he denies him only as his master.
*****
Forgetful of their own rebellious past, indifferent to their foes’ humanity, convinced they were history’s agents, the Athenians at Melos were blindsided by reason and confidence. So too with modern revolutionaries: they were once rebels, resisting others who sought to oppress them. But the oppressed eventually forgot their origins and became in their turn the oppressor.
*****
Instead, Camus claimed the sacred ground of hesitation: only there do we have the space necessary to understand the tragic complexities of life.
*****
The best we can do, the closest we can get to a solution, is “to describe and see the conflict clearly.”108Such a description deprives us of metaphysical or ideological solace, but this is a good, even great thing. A life empty of transcendental guidance, a life that assumes responsibility for its choices, a life that knows the importance of clearly stating the problem is a life alert to the dangers of launching oneself blindly into a solution.
*****
The consequences of a world freed from limits had preoccupied Camus for most of his life: he brooded over metaphysical limits in The Myth of Sisyphus, moral limits in Letters to a German Friend, and political limits in The Rebel.
*****
In October 1957, she visited him in Paris and told him of her meeting with the FLN leaders. She also brought along the essays of Muslim grade school students. Their teacher had asked them to write on the question: “What would you do if you were invisible?” In every one of the essays, the student explored how he or she would devote his or her time to killing the French. Upon concluding his account in his journal, Camus wrote: “I despair for the future.
*****
This world, he reflects, was “a cruel place to live, even without the men. . .
*****
Camus’s muteness spoke to his inability to deny the legitimate rights of either the pied noir or Arab communities.
*****
So, too, for Camus: his insistence on calling things by their names eventually forced him into silence. Both men are moralists and, consequently, both men are condemned to a life of exile.
But Daru’s and Camus’s common plight is, for want of a better word, also metaphysical. The relationship these men have to the universe is as uncertain as their relationship to Algeria. Are they guests? Or are they hosts? Being a host implies knowledge and duties, while being a guest entails rights and protections. But in this silent and indifferent world, both Daru and Camus seem no less deprived of a host’s knowledge than of a guest’s rights. This fundamental instability—this inability to know where one stands in relation to others and the world—is just another way of acknowledging our absurd condition.
*****
As the story reveals, seeing the world clearly and making the right moral choices do not change the world.
*****
For Camus, service to others is as sacred as anything can be in a world shorn of transcendental meaning.
*****
Among the ways we serve is through communication: because of the silence hanging over our lives, we must speak to and for ourselves, to and for others. We do so not only in the face of silence, but in order to give voice to that silence.
*****
For most of his life, Camus dwelt on the changing nature of silence. He identified silence, like the state of childhood innocence, with his mother. Camus’s silence later came to express the tragic reality of Algeria and the tragic reality of the human condition. And silence followed in the wake of attention.
*****
Camus’s insistence that, “in the presence of the world, I have no wish to lie or to be lied to. I want to keep my lucidity to the last, and gaze upon my death with all the fullness of my jealousy and horror.”
*****
In his stubborn commitment to the world of politics, Camus understood better than anyone else that existential despair was a luxury the poor and oppressed could not afford. But he also understood that his responsibilities as an artist went beyond the realm of politics. In a world that denies us transcendental solace, the artist’s task is to justify the pursuit of meaning by human beings. At the heart of Camus’s writing, as Jeffrey Isaac notes, is “a conception of humans as agents who, as possessors of interpretative and material powers, seek to sustain value in their world.”
Zaretsky Robert
our morality and our humanism seem easily learned but scarcely earned.
*****
It is the human being’s confrontation with the universe, not something inherent to the universe itself, that leads to absurdity.
*****
“All I can hope to do,” he said shortly after World War II, “is show that generous forms of behavior can be engendered even in a world without God and that man alone in the universe can still create his own values. That is, in my opinion, the sole problem posed by our era.”
*****
The Mediterranean is a philosophical no less than a physical state, elevated by Camus to the symbol of an ancient world of human values and thought, profane, clasping the earth, a world he erected against the overreaching and dry ideologies he associated with the gray landscapes of urban Europe.
*****
For Camus, the most overpowering memory of childhood was of silence. The grandmother, Catherine Sintes, a widow, bitter and violent, was unlettered and laconic; with Camus and his brother, Lucien, she often expressed herself with slaps and whippings rather than words. Uncle Etienne had been mute until his early teens; after an operation, he was able to speak, but only haltingly and simply, communicating “as much by onomatopoeic sounds and gestures as with the hundred-odd words at his disposal.”19 And his mother, also named Catherine, was illiterate and partly deaf. According to a family tradition, Catherine Sintes had been perfectly at ease speaking as a young woman; it was only in 1914, after she received news of the death of her husband, that her speech was hobbled.
It was when she lost her husband and her tongue that Catherine Camus lost what little freedom she had had. With the infant Albert and the toddler Lucien, she moved back in with her mother in Belcourt. She spent the rest of her life working long hours as a cleaning woman, returning to a home ruled by a harsh matriarch and to two sons whom she loved but was scarcely able to protect, much less nurture. When the grandmother grabbed her whip and began to beat one of the children, Catherine Sintes stood to one side, pleading only that she not strike him on the head. She was there, yet as elusive as the father Camus never knew; she was indispensable, but silent like the world that refused to surrender meaning; she filled her son’s life, though the nature of her presence was forever an enigma.
*****
Even more than the sea, the figure of the silent mother occupies the center of Camus’s writings
*****
Silence, in short, is never merely physical or aural. For Camus, it is also metaphysical and ethical.
*****
Shortly before his death, he described his literary goal: to write a book at whose center would be “the admirable silence of a mother and one man’s effort to rediscover a justice or a love to match this silence.”
*****
Camus, like Diderot, believed in the moral potential of theater. This conviction helps explain the weakness of his theatrical pieces, which are often mired in a kind of ethical didacticism.
*****
In political terms, his despair was especially deep, if only because of the gap between the ideals of the French republic and the reality of Kabylia.
*****
Camus left for Paris in 1939. The government had helped ensure that no one in Algiers would hire him.
*****
They argue that from the place of individual revolt against an absurd world staked out by The Stranger, he moves to the high moral ground of collective resistance in The Plague. But the high ground was already reached in the earlier novel.
*****
As Conor Cruise O’Brien puts it, “the reader does not quite feel that Meursault has killed a man. He has killed an Arab.”13 But is it so simple? Is it instead possible that Meursault himself has been turned into an “Arab”—namely, a character deprived of his humanity? As David Carroll suggests, Meursault is gradually stripped of everything that identifies him as an individual human being.
*****
By 1944, the French police had arrested and deported there more than seventy-five thousand Jews, refugees and citizens alike. By war’s end, fewer than two thousand were still alive.
*****
Meursault’s transformation into the “Other” mirrors in unsettling ways the transformation of the French Jewish community under Vichy.
*****
How are we to act—what are we to do—in a world shorn of God or meaning? The answer, Camus concluded, lay in the solidarity of human beings.
*****
As André Trocmé, the village minister, told the police officer who demanded to know the whereabouts of the refugee Jews: “We do not know what a Jew is. We know only men.”
*****
Even closer to Trocmé’s blunt assertion is the observation Camus made in his notebook during the same period: “The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.”
*****
The question now became how best to serve this love. The answer for Camus arrived in 1943 when Pascal Pia, the former editor in chief of Alger-Républicain, who had assumed the same function at Combat, invited Camus to join the paper. Working at first from nearby Lyons, then soon after in Paris, where he moved toward the end of 1943, Camus helped lay out the pages for the paper, while also editing and writing. In early June 1944, when Pia left the paper to take on new responsibilities in the Resistance, Camus replaced him. By then, more than 300,000 copies of a single issue were being printed, reaching a far greater audience than Alger-Républicain ever did.
When France was liberated, Combat was widely seen as the voice of the Resistance. Yet that voice grew hesitant during the confused and complex period called the épuration, or purge. Four years of increasingly brutal occupation had sowed the seeds for revenge. But the nature of the harvest remained unclear.
*****
The absence of meaning is not a call to despair or an invitation to leap joyfully into the abyss. Instead, the world’s stubborn silence leads us to acknowledge our common predicament and spurs us to rebel against it.
*****
Rather than “mutilating” man, as the Nazis did, we must safeguard the ideal of justice that man alone is capable of conceiving
*****
Pushed by the overwhelming pressures of justice, Camus condemned a man to death. It was a decision that clashed with all the values he had once held and a decision he would soon regret.
*****
Sartre and his colleagues had set themselves a formidable task: to depict as honestly as possible the horrors of communism, yet frame them so as “to be left with an experience and a project worthy of their dreams and defensible in their own philosophical and ethical language.”
*****
As his Letters to a German Friend already announced, the true rebel acts in full knowledge that there will be no ultimate vindication or justification.
*****
During the war, Camus grew more convinced than ever that existentialism was a diagnosis mistaken by many for a cure. By itself, it was, quite simply, “zero point,” a datum of existence that “teaches nothing.”47 The experience of liberation only confirmed this belief: the existentialist was right to affirm the existence of the absurd but wrong to propose that we remain there. “Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience,” he insisted, but “it should not become a dead end.”
*****
Just as recognizing a physical illness leads to the search for a cure, recognizing the absurdity of our lives leads to revolt. And the idea of revolt, Camus concluded, “could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence.”
*****
His parting words were grim: “The conditions under which daily newspapers operate have evolved to the point where only large circulation papers can break even. I leave it to readers to ponder what this law of economics portends for freedom of thought.
*****
The Rebel is an essay on the necessity of being impolite.
*****
73From the recognition of absurdity comes revolt; and from revolt comes the recognition that we are not alone.
*****
the act of rebellion reveals certain moral limits common to all human beings.
*****
The Melian offer of friendship to Athens exemplifies the core of Camus’s ethical thought: the slave does not deny his master as a fellow human being; he denies him only as his master.
*****
Forgetful of their own rebellious past, indifferent to their foes’ humanity, convinced they were history’s agents, the Athenians at Melos were blindsided by reason and confidence. So too with modern revolutionaries: they were once rebels, resisting others who sought to oppress them. But the oppressed eventually forgot their origins and became in their turn the oppressor.
*****
Instead, Camus claimed the sacred ground of hesitation: only there do we have the space necessary to understand the tragic complexities of life.
*****
The best we can do, the closest we can get to a solution, is “to describe and see the conflict clearly.”108Such a description deprives us of metaphysical or ideological solace, but this is a good, even great thing. A life empty of transcendental guidance, a life that assumes responsibility for its choices, a life that knows the importance of clearly stating the problem is a life alert to the dangers of launching oneself blindly into a solution.
*****
The consequences of a world freed from limits had preoccupied Camus for most of his life: he brooded over metaphysical limits in The Myth of Sisyphus, moral limits in Letters to a German Friend, and political limits in The Rebel.
*****
In October 1957, she visited him in Paris and told him of her meeting with the FLN leaders. She also brought along the essays of Muslim grade school students. Their teacher had asked them to write on the question: “What would you do if you were invisible?” In every one of the essays, the student explored how he or she would devote his or her time to killing the French. Upon concluding his account in his journal, Camus wrote: “I despair for the future.
*****
This world, he reflects, was “a cruel place to live, even without the men. . .
*****
Camus’s muteness spoke to his inability to deny the legitimate rights of either the pied noir or Arab communities.
*****
So, too, for Camus: his insistence on calling things by their names eventually forced him into silence. Both men are moralists and, consequently, both men are condemned to a life of exile.
But Daru’s and Camus’s common plight is, for want of a better word, also metaphysical. The relationship these men have to the universe is as uncertain as their relationship to Algeria. Are they guests? Or are they hosts? Being a host implies knowledge and duties, while being a guest entails rights and protections. But in this silent and indifferent world, both Daru and Camus seem no less deprived of a host’s knowledge than of a guest’s rights. This fundamental instability—this inability to know where one stands in relation to others and the world—is just another way of acknowledging our absurd condition.
*****
As the story reveals, seeing the world clearly and making the right moral choices do not change the world.
*****
For Camus, service to others is as sacred as anything can be in a world shorn of transcendental meaning.
*****
Among the ways we serve is through communication: because of the silence hanging over our lives, we must speak to and for ourselves, to and for others. We do so not only in the face of silence, but in order to give voice to that silence.
*****
For most of his life, Camus dwelt on the changing nature of silence. He identified silence, like the state of childhood innocence, with his mother. Camus’s silence later came to express the tragic reality of Algeria and the tragic reality of the human condition. And silence followed in the wake of attention.
*****
Camus’s insistence that, “in the presence of the world, I have no wish to lie or to be lied to. I want to keep my lucidity to the last, and gaze upon my death with all the fullness of my jealousy and horror.”
*****
In his stubborn commitment to the world of politics, Camus understood better than anyone else that existential despair was a luxury the poor and oppressed could not afford. But he also understood that his responsibilities as an artist went beyond the realm of politics. In a world that denies us transcendental solace, the artist’s task is to justify the pursuit of meaning by human beings. At the heart of Camus’s writing, as Jeffrey Isaac notes, is “a conception of humans as agents who, as possessors of interpretative and material powers, seek to sustain value in their world.”
November 27, 2013
This was a thoroughly satisfying read. It is a brief but rich biography of Albert Camus, a revolutionary and moralist who, had I discovered years ago, may well have changed the course of my life. It documents his sad childhood in Tangiers, his rise to fame in WWI and his work in the Kabyle, his exile in France, his dealings in the Resistance and friendship turned sour with Sartre. It also touched on his philosophy and explained the autobiographical nature of his novels. For the uninitiated to Camus, this is an exceptional starting point. It's all I can do not to go buy all of his books right now.
April 21, 2011
An amazing biography that goes into Camus' philosophical development. My only complaint was that it was far too short.
March 1, 2019
The short review for this is me putting my left hand on my heart and raising my right saying in Camus, I believe
That review might seem profound at first but once the shock factor wears off, a dispassionate reader will look at it and accuse me of being one of those men Galileo's father warned him against. The men who hide behind great names, who have nothing to contribute but just regurgitating old ideas. I do not number among them.
The reason I admire Camus so much (he ranks number 1 among the intellectuals I respect ergo the King of Intellectuals and Leader of the First Men) is because the thoughts I pegged as most personal and most profound, that occurred to me at my most difficult moments or in the quiet recesses of my contemplation, Camus had thought about them about a millennia back. He had even expanded on them beyond my initial one liners. This same effect occurs to me when I come across something on Reddit which I thought of independently and there are no words that can explain the motions I go through. It shows that no one has monopoly over knowledge. It reveals itself to anyone who earnestly searches for it and we celebrate the brave souls who came before us and searched for it and the ones who continue and will continue with the quest.
This book was divinely written. It has that seamless mix of content, prose and ideas kind of like the feeling of tasting the first scoop of Neopolitan ice cream on a hot afternoon... that's the taste of truth!Thank You Zaretsky for writing this gem. Mostly recommended to Camus fans.
That review might seem profound at first but once the shock factor wears off, a dispassionate reader will look at it and accuse me of being one of those men Galileo's father warned him against. The men who hide behind great names, who have nothing to contribute but just regurgitating old ideas. I do not number among them.
The reason I admire Camus so much (he ranks number 1 among the intellectuals I respect ergo the King of Intellectuals and Leader of the First Men) is because the thoughts I pegged as most personal and most profound, that occurred to me at my most difficult moments or in the quiet recesses of my contemplation, Camus had thought about them about a millennia back. He had even expanded on them beyond my initial one liners. This same effect occurs to me when I come across something on Reddit which I thought of independently and there are no words that can explain the motions I go through. It shows that no one has monopoly over knowledge. It reveals itself to anyone who earnestly searches for it and we celebrate the brave souls who came before us and searched for it and the ones who continue and will continue with the quest.
This book was divinely written. It has that seamless mix of content, prose and ideas kind of like the feeling of tasting the first scoop of Neopolitan ice cream on a hot afternoon... that's the taste of truth!Thank You Zaretsky for writing this gem. Mostly recommended to Camus fans.
May 26, 2020
This short book is an excllent guide to Camus’ thought and philosophy and is particularly helpful in elucidating how important events in his life influenced his thinking or illustrated how his thinking influenced his action. I enjoyed the way the author was able to weave Camus’ writing and biographical anecdotes together to make his points about the origins and substance of Camus' philosophy of life and his approach to writing.
June 20, 2017
A "semi-biography," the author presents Camus' complex life, lived - so briefly - by an extremely complex man; yet the reader, at first baffled by Camus' apparent conflicting political decisions, by the end this essay the author has brought into incredible clarity Camus' philosophy.
May 16, 2021
«به خاطر سکوتی که بر زندگی هایمان سایه می افکند، باید با خودمان و برای خودمان، با دیگران و برای دیگران، حرف بزنیم.این کار را نه در مقابله با سکوت که برای بخشیدن صدایی به سکوت انجام می دهیم.» -از متن کتاب
November 8, 2024
I’ve read The Plague and Camus personal writings but this offers another insight into Camus mind during what can arguably be the biggest moments of his life. I recommend this for anyone interested in Camus.
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April 7, 2021Brilliant essay. It is important to pay attention to the "silence" in the life of Camus, at the beginning of the book (Regarding Camus) Not only to understand him but to enjoy the beautiful epilogue.
November 6, 2021
اگر به آثار کامو علاقه مند هستین خوندن این کتاب کمک میکنه که دریافت بهتری از آثارش داشته باشین و بیشتر به ابعاد اخلاق گرایی این نویسنده پی ببرین.
October 22, 2022
O autor analisa o Camus político sob a perspectiva de sua atuação (e posterior silêncio) na questão colonial argelina.
May 4, 2021
wonderful essay on Camus - very much worth the read for anyone interested in learning more about him.
March 31, 2014
I look at the long - the usually very long - biographies on my shelves about other writers awaiting my attention, and thank Robert Zaretsky for his brevity and focus on key moments - "elements in the life" of Albert Camus.
I particularly liked the section about the formation of Camus' early political and philosophical ideas on his trip to the impoverished region of Kabilya in the 30s, the discussion of his turn about on the position of the collaborationist writer, Robert Brasillach who went to the gallows in the 40s, and the fascinating falling out between Camus and Sartre in the 50s.
This and so much more achieved in less than 200 pages. A great biography and easy read.
I particularly liked the section about the formation of Camus' early political and philosophical ideas on his trip to the impoverished region of Kabilya in the 30s, the discussion of his turn about on the position of the collaborationist writer, Robert Brasillach who went to the gallows in the 40s, and the fascinating falling out between Camus and Sartre in the 50s.
This and so much more achieved in less than 200 pages. A great biography and easy read.
January 14, 2016
Decent if superficial view of a complex man
I wish this writer had plumbed more depth and detail of the life of this important man. It is very good and elucidating however it feels incomplete. Perhaps it reflects the man himself.
I wish this writer had plumbed more depth and detail of the life of this important man. It is very good and elucidating however it feels incomplete. Perhaps it reflects the man himself.
October 7, 2013
Gave me an entirely new understanding and love of Camus.
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June 1, 2018848.914 C211Xz 2010
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