I read Albert Camus’s The Plague in early October 2020. It took me rather a long time to read, probably due to the hectic pace of life, even for a semi-retired, semi-quarantined old lady with a lifelong avid reading habit. But also partly due to the way it’s written. I think this is the only book I can recall reading with a sense of annoyance while I was reading it, and yet feeling a huge surge of satisfaction (like, finally! I understand where this was going all along) at the very end, and now see in hindsight as a thoroughly worthwhile and “good” read. It does make me wonder “How did he do that?”
Well, oddly, I just thought of another “great book” that affected me in a similar way, which was Crime and Punishment. And as it happens, Camus claimed Dostoevsky as a major influence on both his thought and writing. So there’s that.
I read The Plague not just during a plague, but also during what some claimed to be an attempted fascist takeover of the government of my primary country. This is interesting because experts say the plague in The Plague is really an allegory for fascism, and that the pace and plot of the novel is more about Camus’s experience of being in Paris during the start of the Nazi occupation than it is about any experience of plagues he might have had. (He didn’t actually live through a plague, but he did have tuberculosis as a young man, a…
