A review by cayley_graph
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

2.0

Some books are temporal and ephemeral; they were meant to be read in a certain place, by a certain type of people, at a certain time. Almost all authors write for their peers and not some hypothetical reader hundreds of years in the future. Even so, some books transcend their immediate trappings. This book does not. 

It's a collection of essay on how an absurdist (man) ought to live life. The philosophy can be summarised as: 1) life has no meaning/fate/destiny, except what you make and 2) just because life is meaningless does not mean it cannot be happy. Sisyphus is happy pushing his rock up the hill only to have it fall down because he enjoys the journey and is not attached to the outcome. 

It is nigh on unreadable. I have read Dostoyevsky and Kafka, but since I cannot remember all the details from those story that are referred to, so some of the reactionary essays were impossible. At the time, those were the works of the day that everyone would have read and talked about. Today, these essays require you to read (reread or at least refresh) your knowledge of several other books, of varying degrees of enjoyability. 

The impression I got from this was the Camus was traumatised from WWII; he and everyone else experienced a very visceral time of hardship. His reaction, like many other people, was to make this very polished, very cerebral world of literature and abstract thoughts. So his book has beautiful sentences that one cannot make heads nor tail of. I can imagine someone come home from the horrors of the war and feeling comforted and safe reading these sentences and pondering on these abstract ideas, for a bit of separation from their immediate surroundings and memories.

But yes, no, I would not recommend this book to a modern reader, unless existentialism, absurdism, Kafka and Dostoyevsky is their jam. Also, I the essays in the appendix on Iran and Algiers were insightful into the times and painted a vivid picture. 
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