Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, The [Paperback]

Albert Camus (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (1955)
• ASIN: B000GS5VL4
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 4.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,259,971 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great introduction to existentialism, December 15, 2009

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Jean A. Jones (North Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, The (Paperback)

This is a great way to introduce someone to existentialism. I always thought Camus to be much more accessible to say, Jean Paul Sartre. If you know anyone who wants to know more about existentialism, tell them to read this book. It's a great introduction to what existentialism is about. It also makes sense of Camus' most famous book, The Stranger.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sisyphus punishment and life's absurdity, Camus is at his best, June 27, 2008

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Medusa (Troy, MI) - See all my reviews

It is not unexpected, that in the myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, describes human predicament as a form of exile and life as a meaningless struggle. Granted, Camus presents his philosophy of absurdity in all his works, but in this special work he's clearly explaining how his unique view of life's absurdity came to life.

Camus is simply trying to say that absurdity is the incompatibility between this irrational world and humans' eternal needs to reason and search for a purpose in life. Through a rigorous examination of various philosophers' work, Camus argues that most thinkers faced the absurdity and tried to escape it, i.e. by either accepting the world's irrationality and finding God in the process, or as phenomenology proposes, rejecting rationality unless the human mind can comprehend it.

The most intriguing aspect is that Camus is not arguing the righteousness of his absurd thinking; he's just proposing that this way of thinking is inevitable (maybe just like death). He is debating the possibility of living with the absurd instead of trying to overcome it. Also, Camus doesn't debate any atheist thoughts, and doesn't deny God's existence or admit it. Camus simply admits that he doesn't know of a definite way to know if there's a God or purpose to life, and wonders if he can survive knowing the absurd and living with it. However, I disagree with Camus' conclusion that Kafka is an existentialist who chooses a leap of faith over accepting life's absurdity. Kafka produced great works without forcing a conclusion, leaving it to the readers to come to their own resolution.

Another interesting point that Camus raises-but I prefer to ignore as my own act of eluding-is talking about Don Juanism as related to being absurd; Camus just dismisses all assumptions that Don Juan is melancholy or seeking true love , he's simply an innocent human (as opposed to Christian concept of sin) who enjoys the moment, the day to day seductions, and the increased number of his conquests. What Camus is proposing might be real but it dismisses the harm of living without a moral code which leads in a way to earlier nihilism.

Over all, Camus magnificently analyzes many aspects of life: hope, suicide, death, freedom, and conquest, which might be an absurd reasoning to some people who prefer to blind them selves with hope or "act of eluding" as Camus refers to it, but I'm sure to others, it is very intriguing and refreshing.

Camus's act of questioning the absurdity of life at this point while still trying to live life meaningfully is just an outstanding thinking act coming from a very subjective thinker.

5.0 out of 5 stars Camus's philosophic essay on life and the its alternatives, November 4, 2010

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Willis Goodlett (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays (Paperback)

Camus is a writer who concerns himself with the challenges of existence and with joys and tribulations of one's own life. It is a deep book and I am reading it in both the original French and in this excellent translation. A must read if one wants to understand

the thoughts and ideas that motivated this most original and gifted mind which influenced the latter half of the twentieth century. One can see these thoughts inserted into his fictional works that won the Nobel prize for literature in 1957.