Albert Camus

A Very Short Introduction

De: Oliver Gloag

Narrado por: Graham Halstead

Few would question that Albert Camus (1913-1960), novelist, playwright, philosopher and journalist, is a major cultural icon. His widely quoted works have led to countless movie adaptions, graphic novels, pop songs, and even t-shirts.

In this Very Short Introduction, Oliver Gloag chronicles the inspiring story of Camus' life. From a poor fatherless settler in French-Algeria to the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gloag offers a comprehensive view of Camus' major works and interventions, including his notion of the absurd and revolt, as well as his highly original concept of pure happiness through unity with nature called "bonheur". This original introduction also addresses debates on coloniality, which have arisen around Camus' work.

Gloag presents Camus in all his complexity a staunch defender of many progressive causes, fiercely attached to his French-Algerian roots, a writer of enormous talent and social awareness plagued by self-doubt, and a crucially relevant author whose major works continue to significantly impact our views on contemporary issues and events.

©2020 Oliver Gloag (P)2020 Tantor

Good summary

A good summary of Camus’ thoughts and experiences and of his disputes with Sartre. Also a fair treatment of his internal contradictions.

Camus: Great poet but not a good man.

Excellent analysis of Camus' life and work in spite of its brevity. Gloag reviews the unsavory attitudes and views of Camus in his later works that most biographers and many of his admirers do not want to discuss. Camus, although always insisting that he was never a follower of any ideology, was at the end of his life firmly in the camp of Algeria remaining a colony of France today, tomorrow and forever. In one of his novels he glamorized French colonists (pied noirs) who utter racist epithets and describe the Algerians as contemptible animals. To the end he described the French as having an inalienable right to their holdings in Algeria. You do not get exposed to this poison by reading The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus or The Plague, books which I loved as a teen. But in his later works, especially The Last Man, the full extent of his lack of humanity is exposed.
In the end, Camus was a magnificent writer of poetic prose and gorgeous essays. His lyricism was in many cases, without peer. But as a human being, he failed miserably to consider the plight of anyone other than himself and his beloved settler/invader class. Just like Mersault in The Stranger, he imagined that the nameless others, the original inhabitants of Algeria, could be disregarded and erased from history with a few pulls of the trigger.

Tedious and uninformative

Half of this book is a shallow and disjointed introduction to the life and work of Albert Camus.
The other half is the author incessantly announcing their contempt for Camus for not being a communist.

That's all well and good, but unfortunately the two halves alternate with each sentence, so every fact you're given about Camus or his work, is followed by a breathless analysis of how it relates to his nihilism, his cowardice, and his love of imperialism,

I came away from this book with a sense that a good author could have taken the same source material and written a good book on the topic of Camus's weakness and irrelevance.
I wouldn't have read it, because I wanted to read a very short introduction to Albert Camus.
But if you want a bad introduction and a bad critique, this book is for you.
And I mean it, I can't think of anyone else this book is for.
The narration is terrific.

Too much biography, not enough philosophy

The historical context was useful but the book barely touched on Camus’s philosophical views. His personal and social bickering with Sartre and others get way too much airtime. His thoughts on life, almost none. Left me feeling like I got a lot of tawdry gossip and not much insight.