The 3 best books by Albert Camus

As a good existentialist writer, perhaps the most representative of this trend or genre, Albert Camus He knew that he needed to write very early on. It makes sense that one of the authors who has tried the most to use fiction to reach the soul in its ultimate sense, emerges as a writer since youth pushes that knowledge of existence. Existence like that wasteland that extends once childhood is abandoned.

From this contrast born with adulthood comes the estrangement of Camus, the feeling that, once outside paradise, one lives in alienation, in the suspicion that reality is an absurdity disguised as beliefs, ideals and motivations.

It sounds kind of fatalistic, and it is. For Camus, to exist is to doubt everything, to the point of being deranged. His three published novels (we must remember that he died at the age of 46) offer us lucid glimpses into our reality, through characters lost in themselves. And yet, it is wonderful to submit to that humanity naked of artifice. A true literary and intellectual pleasure.

3 recommended novels by Albert Camus

Abroad

Of his first more existentialist period, this novel stands out. And the truth is that for me that narrative period is the author's most authentic (without detracting from what he wrote later).

The first ideas tend to be more natural in this type of deep, transcendent literature… The doubt about what we are, in the face of so much conditioning, lasts throughout the work. Meursault could be all of us, exposed to a mirror where we are unable to recognize ourselves.

Summary: We meet Meursault, its protagonist, who is led by a series of circumstances to commit a seemingly unmotivated crime. The outcome of his judicial process will have no more meaning than his life, corroded by everyday life and governed by anonymous forces that, by stripping men of the condition of autonomous subjects, also exempt them from responsibility and guilt.

The Stranger, Camus

Plague

Perhaps this is his work closest to the reality of the time it was published. War or its initial aroma exposes us all to feelings of unreality, surrealism, the absurdity of living. The threat of maximum violence between humans strips us of any type of defense and opens unfathomable paths of the soul. Not so distant horizons in this XNUMXst century between Covid pandemics and others, our particular plague extended to everything ...

Summary: Without a doubt, this novel had a lot of weight in the decision to award its author the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957: the peak of this century's narrative, a bitter and penetrating allegory of a world that only a catastrophe manages to rehumanize.

An exciting novel, of great density and profound understanding of the human being, it has become one of the most indisputable classics of French literature of all time and one of the most read. Albert Camus (1913-1960) was an author committed to the historical events that shook Europe before and after the Second World War.

A combative journalist, a dissident of all the orthodoxies of his time, a tireless polemicist, he wrote books as fundamental to our culture as Plague, Abroad, and others.

The Plague, Camus

The fall

In this, his last work of fiction, Camus had already completely given himself over to the absurd, to empty existentialism, with no possible answer, constrained by ideological movements without any support but capable of violating everything.

Summary: After The Stranger and The Plague the third and last novel by Camus, who reflected in it the despair of contemporary man, condemned to live in a world dominated by the absurd and forced to discover, behind the illusions of happiness and virtue , the unforgiving harshness of a hostile reality.

5/5 - (8 votes)

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