A review by mveldeivendran
Notebooks 1935-1942 by Philip Thody, Albert Camus

5.0

How often we get influenced by dead people and their ideas? It is not a typical book review/post, it could rather be considered as a confession.

It might seem like a typical shit that one could see with a blasé mindset especially in these internet times people running out of things to say but nevertheless this guy changed the course of my life. I remember reading him for the first time through The Myth of Sisyphus by October 2017. I was a rational believer, a part-time researcher at IIT Madras back then, and now I'm a self-conscious messed up human being. Thanks to Camus and a few other beings.

"What interests me is knowing how we must behave and more precisely, how to behave when one doesn't believe in god or reason."

No surprises, I'm indeed filled with delusions just like every other human beings. Every now and then, I have this delusion that I'm aware of a fewer handful of dead people who kind of figured out everything in their damn lived lives. I strongly believe Camus is one of them. Reading this Journal is a sort of Pilgrimage into his mind on how he built things from the scratch especially this volume showers some light on the development of the novels The Stranger, his posthumously published A Happy Death, Caligula, and Essays like Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel.

"A man who sought life where most people find mnmarriage, work, etc and who suddenly notices, while reading a fashion catalogue, how foreign he has been to his own life (life as seen in fashion catalogue)", wrote in August 1937 by Camus, was often considered as the precursor of his novel, The Stranger where the protagonist Meursault was intended to be seen as a man who had gone through the experience of the absurd before the story began.

Life's full of divine absurdities and I'm glad to find my way into seeing things in a broader perspective because of this man. .
Adding more delusion, it motivates me to scribble more on my slack journal. Either way, absurdity reigns, rebellions and revolts comfort while we imagine ourselves to be what we ought to be.

Albert Camus
07/11/1913 - 04/01/1960