Abandon hope all ye who enter here

All of Camus’ writings should start with that disclaimer. By the way, I hate it when people quote “Dante’s Inferno” because there is no such thing, so for the record, I am quoting “The Divine Comedy” which happens to be split in three: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The fact that some editor decided that people didn’t really care about Purgatory and Heaven and published the Hell section separately does not a stand-alone book make. In fact, you don’t get to the best part. Anyway, Dante is not a Nobel Prize Laureate, so enough about him.


I ended up reading more than one of Camus’ books, since I have a collection of his works. As I mentioned before, I read “The Plague” followed by “The Fall” and continuing with “Exile and The Kingdom”. It’s always the same story with different characters and set in different places, so don’t bother. His message always is “There’s no hope in life. All you can aspire to is death”. If you read reviews about him they’ll say things like “insightful” and “shows the greatest understanding of the human mind”, but I personally don’t know where they get that from, unless all the critics are as limited in vision as he is and fail to grasp that life does have a meaning. Even if you were to take the supernatural out of the equation, Wouldn’t you say that helping others and making them happier, devoting yourself to service, could be deemed to be the meaning of life? I read once that the Greek Hedonists became more stoic than the Stoics, because in due time they came to realize that the only true pleasures were those of the spirit, and sometimes I think that people like Camus just didn’t have enough time to come to the same conclusion. I don’t know if he might have, but he did die before he was 40.

If you start reading one of his books, it will suck you in, I assure you. His narrative is powerful. He’ll have you flying high just to drop you suddenly and without warning into a pit of despair and hopelessness. If you’re curious read one and you’ll know how all his books end.