'Notebooks: 1951-1958'
By ALBERT CAMUS

Reviewed by Richard Eder in The New York Times.

The third and last volume of Albert Camus’s notebooks, finally available in English, records his split with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Albert Camus was one of the two pillars of postwar French literature. The other was Jean-Paul Sartre, his comrade in letters if not quite in arms (during the Resistance, Camus dangerously put out a clandestine newspaper, while Sartre stayed safely studying and writing). Then in the early 1950s, they bitterly split.

NOTEBOOKS
1951-1958
By Albert Camus
Translated by Ryan Bloom. 264 pages. Ivan R. Dee. $27.50.

Camus’s pillar stood in Paris, but in a sense it belonged elsewhere: perhaps among the Corinthian columns in North Africa’s Hellenistic ruins. He was a French Algerian, of course, but the point isn’t his provenance but his temperament. He was Mediterranean, a creature of sun and water, fierceness and the senses.

The complete story in The New York Times online.