La peste by Albert Camus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Grueling, Bracing Read Whew! La Peste (1947) by Albert Camus was one of the hardest books for me to finish. After starting it because, of course, of the current pandemic, it took me at least three months to finish the not so long novel. Why? Well I was trying to read it in French, but the real reasons were because it is no page turner, being objective and deliberate in detailing the ways in which the bubonic plague affects life in the French Algerian city of Oran, and especially because I was so exhausted preparing and teaching online classes for the first time during our spring semester. When I did finally finish the book, I fancied myself feeling nearly as exhausted as the Oranians during their seemingly never-ending plague (resembling how covid-19 doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon in the real world). Through the objective voice of the narrator (who remains anonymous till near the end), Camus reports the coming of the plague, its spread, the reaction of the authorities, of the people, and of a few individuals, and so on. Without sensationalizing anything, he depicts the appalling nature of the plague. Although I had some trouble distinguishing between the compact cast of main characters at first and even forgot their names (so fitful was my reading), I finally came to see them as real, distinct individuals: Dr. Bernard Rieux (who wants to minimize the plague sufferings of as many people as possible without judging anyone or succumbing to what would be debilitating feelings of pity), Jean Tarrou (who helps Rieux as part of his quest to see if a man can become a saint without believing in god), Raymond Rambert (a visiting investigative reporter who at first desperately tries to escape the city to be with his wife in Paris), Joseph Grand (a minor bureaucrat who continually rewrites the first sentence of a novel he’s writing in his quest to find the right words), and Cottard (an unstable shady figure who perks up when everyone is living in fear like him). I like how these unheroic men become heroes despite Camus’ efforts to not play the hero-game: “the narrator perfectly knows how regrettable it is to not be able to report here any real spectacle like for example some comforting hero or some striking action similar to those one finds in old stories.” But because Rieux and his friends know that “It’s necessary to fight by one means or another to avoid kneeling,” and that “The essential thing was to do one’s work well,” they work past the point of exhaustion to help people afflicted by the plague, and really do (despite Camus) become heroes for the reader if not for the people of Oran. They become unaffected heroes, not like Oran’s memorial statues, “the taciturn effigies of forgotten benefactors or former great men stifled forever in bronze and trying alone, with their false faces of stone or iron, to evoke a degraded image of what had been the man,” but rather like what Doctor Rieux says: “I don’t have the taste, I think, for heroism or sainthood. What interests me is to be a man.” Human nature being what it is, there are numerous parallels with our coronavirus pandemic and the way it warps the daily lives of individuals and communities, though Camus is focusing laser-like on a single city that has to shut down to avoid spreading the plague beyond its walls: incompetent and obtuse authority figures (officials, doctors, etc.) who don’t want at first to admit the reality of the plague to avoid panicking the people (and themselves) and who hence make it worse when it inevitably ignites; a special hospital ward for plague victims that’s quickly swamped with cases; people trying to profit off the plague economy; people partying in bars during the epidemic; attempts to understand why the plague came giving way to fatalistic acceptance; fruitless attempts to make a vaccine, etc. As the narrator puts it early on, “Plagues, in effect, are a communal thing, but one believes with difficulty in them until they fall on one’s head. There are in the world as many plagues as wars. And, nevertheless, plagues and wars always find people unprepared.” Despite my long and difficult reading of the novel, some scenes remain vivid in my mind: Rieux and his friends watching a boy die in prolonged agony (one of the most painful passages I’ve read in any novel); Rieux and Tarrou going for a swim in the sea; Rieux and Tarrou helping Grand find a word in the first sentence of his novel; Rambert deciding that, “I’d been thinking that I was a stranger in this city and that I had nothing to do with you. But now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen, I know that I am from here, whether I like it or not. This story concerns all of us.” And generally Camus’ descriptions of the plague-afflicted city through the changing seasons. . . Finally, the power of the novel lies in the questions it poses but doesn’t answer, like this one: “Who could affirm that an eternity of joy could compensate for an instant of human pain?” View all my reviews
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