Albert Camus: The Life of Dialogue

Albert Camus: The Life of Dialogue

Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

by Albert Camus.

Knopf. 272 pp. $4.00.

By comparison with the work of men like Koestler, Silone and Orwell, Albert Camus’ writing has always seemed to me somewhat grandiose and porous. He lacked Koestler’s capacity for sustained argument, Silone’s mixture of humor and humaneness, Orwell’s gritty concern for facts. To be sure, Camus never succumbed to the casuistry of the later Koestler or the occasional anti-intellectualism of Orwell; but except for The Stranger, his one first-rate novel and his deepest exploration of the problem of nihilism, Camus’ work had a disturbing quality: all too often he seemed to be making a speech…

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