'' THE COMPLETE NOTEBOOKS '' : BOOK REVIEW

'' The Complete Notebooks '' By Albert Camus Translated Ryan Bloom.

THE FIRST volume of Albert Camus's notebook appeared in 1963, three years after his death in a car accident at the age 46.

INDEED, when he received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming at 44 one off the youngest author to have done so, he wrote in a notebook :

'' Frightened by what's happening to me, what I didn't ask for.''

He reported having panic attacks. A few days later he wrote, '' Never talk about your work '' and ''Those who truly have something to say never speak of it.''

The book, with entries from 1935 to 1942, received two especially notable English -language reviews, from two strikingly different writers.

The first was by A.J. Liebling, the journalist and gourmand, in The New Yorker. Liebling had struck up a friendship with Camus when the French Algerian writer visited America in 1946.

Liebling, a Francophile and press critic, especially admired Camus's work during World War II as the editor of the Resistance journal Combat.

Liebling called Camus's notebooks '' intensely enjoyable '' and a book '' to which one can return, at almost at any page, with assurance of pleasure.''

The second review was by Susan Sontag, in the New York Review of Books. 

Sontag opened with this provocation : '' Great writers are either husbands or lovers.'' Because of his tranquility and air of reasonableness, Sontag suggested, Camus was '' the ideal husband of contemporary letters.''

[ She could not have known that according to his later biographers, he was serially unfaithful to his wives, the actress Simone Hie and the pianist Francine Faure.]

The rest of the Sontag's review was a takedown of Camus both as a novelist and as a philosopher. '' Was Camus a thinker of importance ?'' she writes.

"The answer is no.'' She heaped more contumely on the notebooks themselves, calling them sketchy and impersonal and '' not great.''

Several more volumes of Camus's notebooks would appear over the years, and they're collected in full for the first time in '' The Complete Notebooks.''

Picking the book up, I had Liebling's and Sontag's warring voices in my mind.

Putting it down, after completing its nearly 700 pages, I was surprised to find myself, a committed Liebling fanatic, on the Sontag side of the divide.

Camus Notebooks, which run from 1935 to 1959, aren't to be confused with diaries.

The World Students Society thanks Dwight Garner.