To read Albert Camus’s Notebooks – comprehensive, newly translated and expertly annotated by Ryan Bloom – is to enter the engine room of the writer’s mind and to glimpse its complex workings and components stripped back to their essentials. They comprise an intellectual and spiritual autobiography, not an account of his life. But of course they contain seductive vignettes lifted straight from experience among the aphorisms, observations, drafts and schemas for writings, stitched together in a collage that reflects a remarkably agile mind in constant motion.

The Notebooks bring to mind the fertile chaos of an artist’s studio. Think of Francis Bacon’s, filled with prompts and reminders, the raw rubble of everyday life, preserved in sedimentary layers out of which, alchemically, the paintings emerge. Similarly, Camus’s published essays and novels are here in fragmentary form, as yet unshaped but evolving; and Bloom’s invaluable footnotes help us track the connections, trace the echoes and nail familiar phrases that ambush us from time to time. ‘Today, Maman died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know’ – the opening of The Stranger springs out of the undergrowth back in autumn 1938, though the novel would not be published until 1942. Camus was spinning various scenarios and characters for that novel alongside A Happy Death (published posthumously) and soon early ideas for The Plague, working towards fulfilling his sharp injunction to himself from this time: ‘Make notes every day in this notebook; have a work written in two........

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