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I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Monday, July 07, 2014


Just Finished Reading: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus (FP: 1960)

This is a collection of essays on a variety of subjects originally published from the mid-1940’s to the late 1950’s. I came across it originally when searching the Net looking for information to back up my Masters dissertation which mentioned several ‘Letters to a German friend’ published in the year immediately prior to the Liberation of Paris in August 1944. Together they made a cogent (and in my case useful) argument against the modern malaise of Nihilism. Continuing with articles from the underground newspaper Combat about the liberation of his adopted city he gives a very visceral account of the fighting as the Resistance rose up in advance of the Allied armies advance. There followed several interesting short treatises on the pessimism following the war, atheism, a defence of one of his plays based in Spain, comments on Marxism, South American dictatorship, press freedom, a whole section on Algeria (the authors home country), the political situation in Hungary (1958) and the West’s lack of response, a very well argued and emotionally engaged debate against the use of Capital Punishment on multiple grounds which impressed me greatly (not that I’ve ever been an advocate of such things) and finally an interesting article about the creative process.

Whilst readable and thought provoking over all I did find the spread of topics a little distracting. The other works I’ve read had (obviously) much more structure and held together as ideas. This was much more of a shotgun approach to his work. Actually, for me at least, it was much more interesting from an historical point of view, especially regarding the author’s time in the Resistance and his views on Hungary in particular and the Soviet Union in general. Added to this was, inevitably given the subject matter, his political thoughts and speculations on the future of Europe. I was too unfamiliar with the Algerian conflict to get much from his articles – which took up about 40 pages – and had no idea who the main players mentioned where. I do know that his calls for dialogue and restraint failed but not much more than that.

Neither biography, history, politics nor philosophy this really didn’t work for me. I managed not to skip bits but it was a bit of a slog from time to time. Although it certainly didn’t put me off reading more Camus I’d only recommend this to the completist’s out there.  

2 comments:

wstachour said...

I've read only his "The Stranger," I believe.

This sounds interesting--it's certainly a period in history that I love--but like you I fear I'm too unfamiliar with much of it.

CyberKitten said...

I've read 'The Myth of Sisyphus' and 'The Rebel' both of which are very good and surprisingly readable considering.... Another French philosopher I like (and I admit to having a 'thing' for French philosophy) is Michel Foucault. Again very readable.

I have three books coming up about Occupied France - one of which has a large American element..... Watch this space as they say!