AMERICAN JOURNALS <i> by Albert Camus translated by Hugh Levick (Paragon House: $9.95) </i>

The notebooks that Albert Camus kept on his lecture tours of the United States in 1946 and South America in 1949 contain some fascinating impressions from one of the most significant novelists of the postwar era. Camus saw America as a country where “everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic,” where people are generous and hospitable “without affection” and where “everyone looks like they’ve stepped out of a B-film.” His descriptions of the miasmal heat and the juxtaposition of luxury and squalor in Brazil would be integrated into his later works, especially “The Plague.” Hugh Levick’s translations capture the author’s spare, incisive style.