before we get to the books you have chosen, how did you first become interested in albert camus?
It’s a funny story, actually. well, it would be funny if it wasn’t true. it was after the 2016 election. donald trump had been elected president of the united states and i was absolutely horrified and not knowing where to turn for comfort or guidance but my coping mechanism, in general, is to turn to books . the answer is always found in a library. I realized that people had been able to stand up and fight Nazis during World War II and as bad as Donald Trump was in 2016, he certainly wasn’t Hitler. there were no Nazis walking the streets. So, I thought I would turn to the French resistance, which had resisted the Nazis, thinking that if they could find the courage to resist that, then I could find the courage I needed to get through the trump years. in the U.S. one thing led to another and now four years have passed and I haven’t stopped reading and thinking about camus.
You are reading: Books by albert camus
Am I right in thinking you started out as an analytical philosopher?
that’s right, yes.
It’s interesting that you’ve moved in this direction.
I think there is a real difference between the way the two traditions can be applied to life. With the immediacy of the trump administration, I was looking for a way to relate to the world and be able to do something. the philosophy of albert camus gave me something more impactful and action-orienting than what i could find in analytic philosophy.
aren’t you writing a book on camus now?
I’ve been asked to write a book, yes. but, unlike camus, I find it very difficult to write in the midst of all this calamity.
for readers who may not know much about him, very briefly, who was albert camus?
albert camus was born in 1913 in northern algeria. his father died in the first world war. he grew up in pretty severe poverty, but turned out to be a stellar student. he won a scholarship to continue his education beyond the primary stage. His family initially resisted because they were so poor they needed him to go to work, but Camus’s teacher, Louis Germaine, advocated this on his behalf, saying that he was a very bright student and that he should be able to continue. Finally, the teacher was able to convince Camus’ family and he continued with his education.
“he says in the plague that most people aren’t bad, they just misunderstand what’s important”
he studied philosophy. he worked for a time as a journalist, as a reporter, until he began to write plays that caught the attention of French intellectuals. During World War II he was the editor of the underground resistance newspaper, Combat. then he went on to write the myth of sisyphus, the plague, the fall, the rebel and all the things he is now famous for, eventually winning the nobel prize for literature at the age of 44.
and tragically he died comparatively young, right?
he did. she died quite shockingly, actually, and really in the most absurd way. Actually, he had a train ticket in his pocket to travel, but instead, he made a last-minute decision to get in the car with his editor, Michel Gallimard. They were driving down the road and the car went out of control, hit a tree and he died on impact.
Do you know how old he was?
he was 46 years old.
you have chosen five books for us: are they all by camus?
they are.
what’s the first?
I’m going to be a bit of a rebel here. my first choice is the drop. this is my absolute favorite camus novel.
It’s almost a novel. is very short
is very short. in fact, the first time i read it was on a plane flying from new york to amsterdam and i finished it with time to spare.
the fall is set in amsterdam, isn’t it?
it is. It is told from the first-person perspective of an unreliable narrator, who tells the story of how he came to find himself in this bar in Amsterdam, after having left Paris. it’s a really fascinating book.
Without giving away too much, like most if not all of Camus’s books, it has a moral dilemma and subsequent moral reflection at its core. is it fair to say?
yes. One of the things that makes this one so interesting, particularly once you get a sense of who Camus was as a person, is how autobiographical it is and how much of it is him putting himself in the judgment seat, trying to make sense of it. his own place in the world, his own decisions and the impact he has had on other people. The novel itself is fascinating but then, put in the context of Camus’s life and his relationships with other people who influenced her, it really becomes a very powerful work, I think.
‘the fall’ is both a literal and metaphorical fall.
That’s right. the narrator is telling the story of how, one night, while he was returning home from work, a woman jumps from the bridge into the river and that moment comes when he can make a decision. he can go back and save the woman, or he can continue on her way. he turns around, continues, and leaves us to believe that the woman has drowned in the river, although the narrator himself never looks back or checks the consequences of her inaction.
This episode consumes the novel and is about him making sense of who he is and how his actions reveal his real place in the world. it’s about how our place in the world can be at odds with the titles we take for ourselves, or the way people refer to us because of the stories we’ve told them. somewhere in the middle is the truth, and somehow that’s still important.
and the autobiographical parallel is with what happened to camus’s second wife, who had problems with drugs and depression and who, in some ways, camus left lying in the water, right?
that’s correct. Camus’s wife had quite a few difficulties with the way Camus lived her life. It is unclear to what extent Camus’s treatment of her contributed to her mental health problems or vice versa, but she suffered acutely from mental health problems and had attempted suicide. camus felt very burdened by this and felt very responsible for it. His diaries during this time reveal that he was acutely aware of her personal responsibility for contributing to such an acute state of misery. Curiously, Camus was far from alone in judging himself at fault. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins also includes a fictional interpretation of the toll his behavior took on his wife.
So, what do you love about fall? Why is Camus’s book the one you put above all others?
I just think it addresses something really important about how our relationships with each other and the stories we tell about our relationships impact our understanding of who we are and where it allows us to place ourselves in the world. the narrator in the fall works as a judge, and it is his job to pass sentence, decide whether people are good or bad, whether they get a pardon or go to prison. and this instance with the woman on the bridge fundamentally changes his sense of who he is and he can’t go back to where he belonged in the world. And I think that really speaks to the power of narrative and the way that our understanding of our interpersonal conflicts helps mediate our relationships, for better or worse. That’s central to a lot of Camus’ project, because he really focuses on the importance of the “other” and how that prevents us from avoiding the exile we might otherwise find ourselves in.
is famous as a philosopher who, in a sense, embraced the absurdity of life, the meaninglessness of life for an atheist in the middle of the 20th century, without guidelines, with the horrors of the second world war, the tragedies around him in his childhood in algeria and later, and the treatment of the colonies. in this context, throughout his work there is a feeling that there are no direct and simple answers. I wonder if that’s evident in this novel or if it’s just his stance on life in general.
for him, the absurd was a starting point. he says in the myth of sisyphus, which is perhaps his most famous work, that it is a starting point. absurdity itself tells us nothing about the world or what we should do with it. it is just a way of experiencing reality. in the fall there’s an element of absurdity to being walking home from work one day, like you regularly do, and then being faced with this almost cataclysmic life-changing event where this woman throws herself to her death right in front of you. it illustrates the unreliability and chaos inherent in the world. in fact, there is a line in one of his diaries where he says: “the absurdity of the catastrophe does not alter the fact that it exists”. and I think he was really struck by the irrationality of human suffering and how it pervaded every aspect of human existence. but ultimately, no matter how absurd, unfair, or unjust the world is, there is freedom in our choices and our actions.
It is reminiscent of what Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel called “moral luck”, the way we judge the judge depends on the chance events that showed him in a bad light. if that woman hadn’t thrown herself into the river at that time, and that had nothing to do with him, she could have lived her life and been considered a good and decent man. things outside of his control transformed who he was.
I think that’s totally consistent with what camus writes. how these different things shape us is, in itself, absurd because, as nagel would say, this is holding someone responsible for the fortuitous occurrences of fate and that doesn’t really make much sense once you think about it fully. through.
ironically, the netherlands have a “good samaritan law” (they may not have had it at the time, in the 1950s), according to which you are legally guilty in certain situations if you don’t come to someone’s aid . Not all countries have that, but the Netherlands does. Let’s move on to the second book by Camus that you recommend.
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The second book is the plague.
we are having this conversation in early 2020. most of the world is in lockdown with a contemporary plague. so this book resonates in a completely different way than it has in the years since its publication. And I think, for many of us, it seems like a much better book than when we read it when we were younger.
yes. I am reading it for the third time now as we all shelter in place to deal with this global pandemic. I really liked it the first time I read it, obviously enough to read it a second time. but in this third reading, sitting down and having experiences similar to those that happen to the characters in the book, he really realizes how powerful his insights were about human nature and how we respond to the contradiction between simultaneously feeling isolated and separated from everyone we know and yet also exiled by the way that separation makes us feel.
in the book the city of oran is in quarantine. it is a walled city-state. the city gates are closed and everyone has to stay inside. communication with the outside world is absolutely minimal. it’s almost like a claustrophobic setting.
yes, and I think he does it on purpose. it also sets him in a town that he describes as absolutely bleak and ugly. he is not particularly kind to the townspeople and describes them as going through their lives without thinking and not really living either. I think that’s the contrast he’s drawing, to point out how important it is to make use of our lives instead of mindlessly wasting them.
But now, for us, it’s also a kind of experiment to find out who we are. Take away all the things you don’t really need to do, all the interactions you really don’t need to have, and what do you have? what matters? what is important in life now? Health? family? friends? And as I look around me now, there are people in the book who are selfish and people who are incredibly altruistic.
yes, I think it’s fine. the book is meant to be jarring and is drawing our attention to how much of our lives is superficial and meaningless and yet somehow still consumes most of our energy. he has a line in the plague where he talks about people who think of freedom as a right, rather than a duty. they have this mercantile understanding of our relationships with others where the ability to make money is paramount at the expense of everything else. and I think that’s very important when you’re talking about this, because he’s drawing attention to the fact that freedom doesn’t really make sense without others and freedom isn’t meant to be this limitless kind of thing where you can to do whatever you want. he wants, particularly in search of money and business, which he is generally suspicious of. rather, freedom is this recognition that we are united with each other and that what really matters in life, when we are doing something significant, is when we are acting in solidarity, even, and perhaps especially, if that means putting ourselves themselves at risk.
certainly he is a man of the left politically, as was jean-paul sartre. that also manifests itself at certain points in the novel. but do you think he is fair to oran’s businessmen? what did they do wrong? they just mind their own business. this is how they have chosen to live their life. is it fair to them to be described that way? he has sympathy for the doctor and the journalists in the novel, the poor people get some attention, but not the bourgeoisie. they don’t get much sympathy.
not. The bourgeoisie will never get much sympathy from Camus because they see them as largely complicit in the perpetuation of human suffering. he was very affected by his own poverty and the effect that poverty had on the life of his mother, whom he absolutely adored. he was always aware of the role played by social classes. part of it was just an ingrained disdain for oppression that contributed to human suffering. But more importantly, I don’t think Camus is particularly critical of people who act his way. I think he was much more interested in criticizing the larger system. he says in the plague that most people aren’t bad, they just misunderstand what’s important and that much more can be achieved by understanding human behavior that way.
One thing that puzzles me is how he was so astute about how people behave in those kinds of circumstances, because there are a number of patterns: people’s unwillingness to believe what’s going on when they’re in front of his eyes, the intricacies of bureaucracy, which doesn’t really deliver what it’s supposed to, and the way people suddenly find themselves closer than they thought they would be, or get bored with each other. all those things seem to be very astute observations. I don’t know how he knew so much about what happens in a plague situation, in a quarantine situation. he read it? Have you ever experienced anything like that?
It has been said that he did extensive research on the plague. The “plague” is generally considered a metaphor or meta-commentary on Nazism during World War II. I am not necessarily convinced that it is the exclusive interpretation of the novel. other people have argued that he was reading about plagues at the time he was writing this. but one thing that is really interesting in the background is that, for at least a period of time while he was writing the novel, camus was trying to recover from a bout of tuberculosis and was staying in a village in the south of france in the free zone (vichy). The extraordinary events that took place there served as the basis for Philip Paul Hallie’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Spilled. in this small and poor rural town they came together and pooled their resources to save between three and five thousand Jews from the Nazis. camus was in this town while this was happening, how the people hid, how they were separated from his loved ones, while he himself was separated from his loved ones. so I’m not sure to what extent the astute nature of his writing can be attributed to his reading about earlier plagues, or to his first-hand experience of being bedridden with disease, embedded in a town where people are hid from a much more militaristic and malignant kind of ‘plague’.
his experience in occupied paris must also have been important.
yes. he was there for a while too.
what is the third albert camus book you have chosen?
My third book is a bit unconventional, it is the first volume of his notebooks, which go from 1935 to 1942.
I’ve never seen these.
They are absolutely wonderful. there are three volumes of notebooks. the third volume is, for reasons I don’t understand, incredibly difficult to come by unless you want to spend a significant amount of money. the first two are available on amazon and elsewhere.
these notebooks provide many insights into camus as a person, who he was and what he was trying to come to terms with on a day to day basis. they are indispensable, I think, to understand what was his larger project throughout the rest of his writings.
Are these notebooks a simple diary or do they contain the first drafts of Camus’s books?
It’s a bit of both. there are excerpts from different novels he’s working on, and that’s really interesting. you can see passages in a novel where she is trying out a turn of phrase, or where she is using it repeatedly to see how it will sound. there are entire passages of a happy death in the second volume. it’s about him understanding how the philosophy he’s trying to come up with can be applied to the way he lives his life and how he relates to other people. he is really powerful and has some of the most beautiful passages of writing from him.
Is this a book to dive into or would you read it from cover to cover?
I sat down and read it until I finished because the language was so beautiful and the depth of its emotions so powerful that it absorbed me. but it’s definitely the kind of book you can have with a coffee. table and pick and open randomly. you’ll find something incredibly insightful and powerful if you do that, especially in the first volume.
We talked about his interest in the absurd. Are there other themes that recur in Camus’s work?
I would choose two other topics that you keep coming back to. there is this notion of exile, even within the plague, the word ‘exile’ appears 23 times. seems like a strange choice of word to describe the people imprisoned behind the city gates. I think this is something he struggled with himself. he felt that he didn’t really belong anywhere, that he was an exile and a stranger wherever he went. the other is rebellion: this notion that the world as it is must be rejected and something new and hopefully better built in its place.
You started your life in Algiers, right? but she did not stop there. so even though that’s where his roots were, she was never quite at home there.
That’s because, even within Algeria, he was what was called a pied noir, the son of a French colonialist in Algeria. he didn’t really feel like he belonged there. not that he ever felt at home in paris. there is always the feeling, and it comes across very powerfully in the notebooks, of feeling alienated from him and being outside of something that he wants to be a part of. So ‘exile’ is a very important issue. then secondly, the notion of rebellion is, i think, the culminating theme of camus’s work.
political rebellion?
political rebellion is one of the manifestations that rebellion could have, but I think he is interested in rebellion more broadly, as we will see when we move on to the rebel.
what is the next albert camus book you have chosen?
The next book I want to choose is an anthology: it’s the lyrical and critical essays. this is a series of his political and literary essays that give you an idea of who he was as a critical writer, essayist and journalist, but also relates to his philosophy and the ideas he was trying to make sense of. de.
This was made posthumously, presumably.
not. he was alive at the time of publication of this collection and the preface he wrote for it in 1958 justifies adding this to the list because it is more direct and confessional about what he hopes to accomplish. the lyrical and critical essay is one of my favorites because it contains one of my all-time favorite essays by him, which is ‘los almendros’. there’s a passage that’s so beautiful and really sums up what I think he’s working on. In it he says, “we must repair what has been torn, make justice imaginable again in a world so manifestly unjust, give happiness and meaning again to the peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it’s a superhuman task, but “superhuman” is the term for tasks that take a long time for men to perform. that’s all.”
I can tell by the way you read that and the way you talk about it that on camus you have discovered someone who has grasped what you believe about life or actually shown you new things about life. life that you think are incredibly important.
yes. that’s how it is. I think it was Nietzsche who said that all philosophy is biography. it makes sense that the philosophy that resonates with you is the philosophy that most closely matches your worldview. I think that is absolutely correct. For me, it is in Camus’s writings that I very often find passages that are useful in trying to make sense of a world that, frankly, is so absurd that the question of how to go on living in it can consume all of our attention.
It is interesting that it is called ‘lyrical essays’ because it is much more poetic than Sartre, for example, his contemporary, although perhaps not so much a philosopher. his writing is sometimes presented as rhetorical. that passage you quoted is an example. he didn’t just say it, he expressed it very eloquently.
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I completely agree. one of the limitations of philosophy, at least as it is most commonly practiced in academic philosophy, is that it is written in such a way that people don’t want to read it. it’s hard, it’s challenging, and in many ways that’s to your credit. rigor is important to filter out the nuances we need to understand these complicated issues. but it is unpleasant and does not appeal to normal people, whom philosophers should try to reach if the goal is not only to understand the world, but to change it. and camus definitely thought the world should change.
so apart from ‘los almendros’, is there any other essay that stands out for you in this collection?
yes. he has an essay here called “the wrong side and the right side” about a woman who uses a small inheritance to buy a burial plot and spends the rest of her days taking care of her investment. one day she sees that someone, seeing her empty tomb, has left her flowers and realizes that she is already dead for the world. it is, I think, a court order not to sleepwalk through our lives and to live while we can.
“it makes sense that the philosophy that resonates with you is the philosophy that most closely matches your worldview”
also, ‘prometheus in the underworld’. Camus is perhaps most famous for his use of Sisyphus as a metaphor, but it is Promethean, his humanism, and his open rebellion against the gods that Camus saw as a much more fruitful model for human behavior.
Remember me, Promethean was the Titan with whom he stole fire and gave it to men. It didn’t end well for him.
that’s correct. his punishment is one of the most ghastly in Greek myth. he is chained to a rock where, every morning, an eagle rips out his liver.
but why did he steal the fire?
to help mankind, to bring them out of the darkness to which the gods would have condemned them.
Is this like the resistance fighter in WWII or something, a man or a woman who risks their life for other people?
yes. i would say that jean tarrou in the plague is someone whom camus would consider a modern rebel or promethean, who takes these enormous risks, not for his own benefit, not for this notion of heroism, but for the simple reason of wanting to save as many souls as can.
And that, for Camus, is the ideal?
that is without a doubt my interpretation of camus. there is a line at the end of the plague where he writes that although a final victory and sainthood are impossible, it is enough to refuse to “bow down before pestilences and try your best to be healers.”
So, it’s a particular kind of rebellion. It’s not just the need to overthrow an oppressor, but it has a higher goal.
yes, a lot. And I think that distinction is part of what led to the dispute between Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, because Camus insisted that the idea was not just to turn weapons against those who would harm us.
we are in the last book.
yes. this relates quite well. this is the last book, but by no means the least important. I’m choosing the rebel.
It’s a series of essays, isn’t it?
is written that way. this is a decidedly philosophical text, where you’re articulating this notion of rebellion, and how we should understand our place in the world and how to respond to that.
can you say more about it? is it written in the abstract? is it written as an autobiography?
this is the most academic book of camus. is his attempt to make sense of the historical, political, and literary influences that have shaped our world, and how they inform our values in an attempt to figure out where we need to go next. this is not as lyrical a book as any of the others, although there is a chapter at the end where he talks about transcending nihilism which is quite powerful and he is more eloquent. he says that “true generosity towards the future lies in giving everything to the present and the task before us is to transcend nihilism and make sense of the world. but the challenge is that few of us know that this is what we are supposed to do.”
It’s interesting, because Camus repudiated the ‘existentialist’ label, but is still considered an existentialist thinker. there is a streak of nihilism within existentialism, for sure. what is camus’s point of view that existentialists are more concerned with destroying and destroying the complacent past than how we build a better world in the future?
yes. that’s a lot of what he’s writing in the rebel: that just denying what the world is like or simply rejecting it accomplishes nothing; that negation in itself does not fulfill any function. he’s a bit cynical and he’s a bit of a nihilist in his own way and he doesn’t transcend the contradiction of our reality the way the existentialists wanted to think they do.
for camus, what was really important is that we have to create an alternative, we have to be able to overcome the master-slave dialectic way of understanding the world and create a way of relating to each other that just doesn’t have has achieved before, and not simply switch places between oppressor and oppressed.
it is very interesting that you have chosen these five books and have left out two of the most famous books camus wrote. the first omission is the stranger, which is the one he really broke into the public arena with, the classic existentialist novel of a slightly dazed and confused young man who has killed someone. it’s this guy’s inner monologue, trying to come to terms with the insanity of what’s happened to him. is it a fair encapsulation? why did you leave that one out?
I almost feel bad for how often I say that this is not my favorite Camus novel, even though it is certainly a very good one. I left it because I think there is much more to Camus’ thought than the absurdity for which he is best known. indeed, in a footnote accompanying the essay, ‘the enigma’, in lyrical and critical essays, philip thody writes that camus himself was frustrated with french criticism and a public that could not see that his thinking it had evolved beyond what was contained in the stranger and the myth of sisyphus. as i mentioned earlier, absurdity for camus was just a starting point. I’m much more interested in where we should go from there, how we respond to it instead of giving up, and what kind of alternative life forms we might create.
It’s funny that he also makes a brief cameo in the plague. there is a brief aside about the fate of the central character of the outsider within the plague.
the plague is like an extended universe of the camus novels because there seems to be references to all the different characters in there. I don’t know how intentional that was, or how much of it is his subconscious, with themes and situations overlapping as he writes.
The other famous book I thought you might pick is The Myth of Sisyphus. that image of sisyphus rolling his rock to the top of the mountain every day only for him to go back and have to start over, and camus describes him as happy in his task. that is one of the classic ideas that we associate with camus, the ‘happy sisyphus’. which describes our luck.
that’s fair and I went back and forth about leaving the myth of sisyphus and the outsider off the list for exactly this reason. but if the absurd is to be a starting point as camus intended, there are other works of his that deserve our attention.
now, if you had to recommend a biography of someone who shares your enthusiasm for camus, is there one that stands out, one that you particularly enjoyed reading?
yes. I would recommend Oliver Todd’s biography. is by far the most comprehensive I have come across so far. But, as a little side note on that, I recently received Germaine Brée’s biography, which began while he was still alive, and has some very interesting interpretations of Camus’s life.
I don’t know if it’s sensational, but there is a book, it may not be the same book you are describing, I think it was a French biography, which
claimed that camus’s death was not an accident, that his car had been tampered with and that it was the russians who killed him.
germaine brée’s book was started while camus was still alive and then had to be reformatted after his death and re-contextualized.
The book you are thinking of, The Death of Camus, was written by an Italian scholar, Giovanni Catelli, arguing that Camus’s death was the result of a KGB plot. I’m not very convinced about that.
It has to be said, if you look at the wreckage of the car, it was a fast sports car and it was moving very fast and hit a tree head-on. so if he stepped on the ground and got punctured or swerved or something like that, of course he would die. It’s not such an unusual thing to happen.
correct. the author of that book is arguing that the road they were going was completely straight and that there was no reason for the car to swerve sharply and that there are indications, based on analysis of engine parts, that maybe had been tampered with a bit. but, if you know anything about camus, it’s not hard to believe that, before getting in the car, he and his editor had had a few drinks and that they may have been fooling around while driving. I’m not surprised or impossible, given what I know of him, that he might be a bit reckless.
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