Notebooks 1942 - 1951 by Albert Camus - 1991

Paragon, New York, 1991. First trade paperback edition. Condition: Near fine, very light edge wear, price sticker on rear cover.

From 1935 until his death, Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks to sketch out ideas for future works, record snatches of conversations and excerpts from books he was reading, and jot down his reflections on death and the horror of war, his feelings about women and loneliness and art, and his appreciations for the Algerian sun and sea.

A spiritual and intellectual autobiography, Camus' Notebooks are invariably more concerned with what he felt than with what he did. It is intriguing for the reader to watch him seize and develop certain themes and ideas, discard others that at first seemed promising, and explore different types of experience. Although the Notebooks may have served Camus as a practice ground, the prose is of superior quality, which makes a short spontaneous vignette or a moment of sensuous beauty quickly captured on the page a small work of art. Here is a record of one of the most unusual minds of our time.