Between Yes and No — Essays and Stories

The essay comes from Camus's first book and is regarded as a key to all his later work. Its opening sentence sets the tone: 'If it is true that the only paradises are those we have lost, I know what name to give the tender and inhuman something that fills me today.' The author says he will not talk about happiness; his subject is the 'one true feeling' that memory preserves.

The essay moves between two times. In the present, the narrator sits in an empty Moorish café on the edge of an Arab town: in a painting on the wall yellow lions chase sheikhs in green robes, the flames of the stove warm his face, and through the door he can see the bay and the lighthouse's green, red and white lights. In the past there is a boy growing up in a two-storey house in a poor district — his feet still remember the height of the stairs. The transition between these layers is so delicate that at the end the narrator himself asks how he can tell the café he sits in from the room of his past.

At the heart of the essay stands the mother: a woman who lost her husband in the war, who is hard of hearing, who cleans other people's houses, who hands her earnings to her domineering mother and answers 'Nothing' when asked what she is thinking. The grandmother 'raises' the children with a whip; the mother only says 'don't hit them on the head'. The feeling of the boy who freezes before the silence of his mother sitting alone in the dusk — 'is this love?' — is among Camus's most fragile and memorable pages. There is no sentimentality here, only precise observation and great compassion.

The essay then turns to a harsher memory: one evening someone attacks the mother as she sits on the balcony, and the son spends the night beside her in the stifling, vinegar-scented room, understanding for the first time what it means to be 'alone against everyone'. The narrator adds another dreadful scene from a time he lived in a house outside the city — a mother cat unable to feed her kittens, eating the last of them. These images open up Camus's reflection on the danger in the word 'ordinary': at certain moments, seeing life in full clarity can bring a person to the wish to die.

This is where the essay gets its title: a calm that settles in between hope and despair, 'between yes and no'. The final dialogue — 'Is it true I look like my father?' — 'Like two halves of an apple' — is moving in its simplicity. And in the last paragraph Camus's later ethical stance is already visible: people complicate everything; instead of 'he will pay his debt to society', one should simply say 'they will cut off his head'. The sentence would echo again in «The Stranger» and in his essays on the death penalty.

The translation generally conveys the essay's lyrical rhythm, and some sentences are truly beautiful. Even so, this essay is one of the best ways to meet Camus not only as 'the philosopher of the absurd' but as the sensitive son of a poor Algerian family.

• Two time frames: the present moment in the café and childhood memories
• Lyrical, image-rich prose: descriptions of light, silence and smell
• Autobiographical material transformed into philosophical reflection
• An ending built on short, plain dialogue