The Plague by Albert Camus

The Plague by Albert Camus (1947, 320 pages, trans.by Stuart Gilbert)

A Very Influential Post WWII Novel

French Literature on The Reading Life

"Great Fears of the Sickenesses here in the city"-- April 30, 1665, Samuel Pepys

Albert Camus (1913 to 1960-French Algeria) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947 largely for this work and his prior novel The Stranger.  (There is some background information on Camus in my post on The Stranger.)    Both of these works are often assigned in university class devoted to existentialism even though Camus said over and over he was not an existentialist.   (Hmm, can you label you label your self as an existentialist without contradicting the whole idea?)   

The Plague is a photo realistic account of what happens in an Algerian town when an epidemic of the plague breaks out.  There are plenty of accounts of the plots of the novel online for those seeking help with their homework so I will just make a few observations.

The first question that comes to mind is why did Camus win the Nobel Prize based just on two novels and some essays?   I think it is because he captured the immediate post WWII mood of many people, especially French and Japanese, very troubled by the events of the war years.    


I said in my post on Ark Sukura by Kobo Abe that a very important theme in much post WWII Japanese literature concerns finding a way to live an authentic valuable life in a world in which all of the values you were taught to believe in have been exposed as hollow lies.   Maybe this is one of the questions addressed in The Plague. 

Maybe The Plague (and much of the writings of Kenzaburo Oe) could be part of a college reading assignment called "Ethics for  Atheists"?   


I found The Plague held my attention from the start.   Even though I knew what it meant when 1000s of rats started dying all over the city it was still a scary scene right out of a horror movie.   It was interesting to see how the civil authorities react to the outbreak of the plague.   


I am glad I at last have read The Plague.    It is a very important novel and it is actually pretty exciting.   Neophytes in the Japanese novel like myself need to read this book as part of their cultural background.   It is no accident writers of a destroyed culture would gravitate to the works of Camus and Sartre.  


No need to be put off this book thinking it is a crushingly heavy philosophical novel.   


I was given a copy of this book by a patron of my blog in New Delhi, for which I am very grateful.


Please share your experience with Camus with us.


I think the next "big" European novel I will read will be The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

This post is my participation in the I Love France Event which takes place every Thursday on Words and Peace.   I  hope a lot of other people will join in supporting this great event.   


Mel u

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942, 144 pages, translated by Stewart Gilbert)

Why is The Stranger Important

Camus and the Japanese Novel

I recently posted on a short story by Albert Camus, "The Guest".    I am slightly embarrassed to admit that this story was my first Camus.     I knew Camus was a super influential figure and after reading "The Guest" I decided to read both of his two most famous novels, The Stranger and The Plague.


Albert Camus (1913 to 1960-Algiers) is French as a result of colonial conquest.  He won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and died three years later in a car accident.  Much of his work and life was fighting what he saw as the wretched rule of the French in Algeria.    He is considered a core Existential novelist but he totally repudiated this label.  You can learn more about him here.  


The plot of The Stranger is pretty simple and easy to follow.   It is set in Algeria in the 1940s.   A young French-Algerian man is drifting through life.   He seems to have no strong values, no real roots in society or among people, no goals and strong loves or hates.    He has a mother who dies.   He goes to her funeral (he supported her the best he could on his wage-he works as an office clerk) but he shows no outward remorse or sadness at her death.   He does not cry or to  seem to feel much of anything.  He has a girl friend that he likes having sex with but does not care much about.   it is not that he is uncaring to her, he just does not have it within him to care.   


One day he gets into a petty dispute with a local pimp and for the pettiest of reasons shots and kills a man, described as "An Arab".   (I guess the idea is that that is different legally from killing a French person.)    


He is placed in prison and after a few months his trial begins.   He does not seem to find prison all that bad perhaps as he did not find life all that good anyway.   The trial is a crazy farce with most of the time being spent talking about the fact he did  not show remorse at all when his mother died.   There is a great deal made over the fact that right after the funeral he went to a comedy movie.   (This does sound like the fuss made world wide in the media over the reaction of a woman accused of murdering her child after the funeral of the child.)    His attorney is a complete idiot.


Why is The Stranger an enduring classic still on college reading lists world wide?     Partially it may be it echos the emotional attitudes often found in intellectual/bookish people in their late teens and twenties when they sense there are no fixed values and react against their old belief structures by saying then all life must be absurd and meaningless.   In part, The Stranger is about finding a way to live in a world where you must decide for yourself what is right or wrong-when the old Gods have been destroyed.


The Stranger is a very influential book in Japanese literature.   It is not hard to see why.   One of the dominant themes of Post WWII Japanese literature is finding a way to live ethically while achieving maximum self-actualization in a world in which all of the creeds that held sway in your culture for 1000+ years have been shattered and exposed as baseless lies.   This is not ultimately a negative theme at all-it is about freedom.


I was also pleased to note that The Stranger is part of Clifton Fadiman's  Life Time Reading Plan, along with The Plague, which I plan to read very soon.


I was given three Camus titles recently by a patron of my blog from New Delhi to whom I am very grateful.


What is your experience with Camus?




Mel u  

Sarte and Camus-Short Stories by Nobel Prize Winning French Existentialists

"The Wall" by Jean Paul Sartre (1952, 8 pages)
"The Guest"   by Albert Camus (1955, 9 pages)
"The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus (3 pages, 1954)

 Two Nobel Prize Winning French Existentialists

One Refuses the Prize, One Only French Technically

The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded 107 times.    France, at 15, has had more winners than any other country, the UK and the USA are tied for second at 11 each.    Today, in observation of July in Paris , a reading and cultural event,  I will post on two short stories by French writers.   So far I have posted on two works for this event, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo and Ubo Roi by Alfred Jarry.    Today I want to take a quick look at short stories by two super influential Nobel Prize winner, Jean Paul Sarte and Albert Camus.    In a nothing is every as simple as it appears in Paris note, Jean Paul Sarte refused the award and Albert Camus was only technically French.   

Sartre and Camus are both post WWII cultural giants, capturing and helping create the sensibility of a world in which old values have been destroyed.    It is no coincidence that Kenzaburo Oe, whose main theme maybe " finding the courage to live in an ethical way a in world in which the old values are all gone", wrote his dissertation on the work of Sartre and made a visit to Sartre his top priority when he made his first trip to Paris.   Albert Camus's The Stranger and The Plague have long been among the most read post WWII non-Japanese literary works on Japanese college campuses.   

Both of these writers are classified as Existentialists (if you wish some background information there is a good article here.)     

I found it very interesting that both of the two short stories here are about a prisoner awaiting execution and his purely capricious escape.   Both of them are in the hands of jailers who basically have no real idea why the men should be executed but are just "following the rules".  

Jean Paul Sartre (1905 to 1980-France) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964.     He refused the award because he said by accepting an award from a western institution he was siding with the west against Asian interests.   He also did not want to be  reified by the Award into a "Nobel Prize Winning Author".   It has been a very long time since I read anything by Sartre.   Decades ago I read his magnum opus Being and Nothingness and his perhaps most famous literary work, his play No Exit (Hell is other people).   "The Wall" really does do a good job of bringing to life a lot of his basic themes.   As the story opens we are at a small prison.   The jailers are tasked with interrogating the prisoners about a topic that does not interest them (if they even understand it) and the prisoners know it is already stated in their paperwork that they are to be shot.

"The four men asked each one his name and occupation. Most of the time they didn't go any further--or they would simply ask a question here and there: "Did you have anything to do with the sabotage of munitions?" Or "Where were you the morning of the 9th and what were you doing?" They didn't listen to the answers or at least didn't seem to. They were quiet for a moment and then looking straight in front of them began to write."

"The Wall" is simple and easy to follow.   No need to be put off or intimidated by the very heavy cultural import of Sartre.

You can read "The Wall" HERE.   It is worth your time even

Albert Camus (1913 to 1960-Algiers) is French as a result of colonial conquest.    Much of his work and life was fighting what he saw as the wretched rule of the French in Algeria.    He is considered a core Existential novelist but he totally repudiated this label.   (You can learn more about him here.)    His most famous works are his two novels, The Stranger and The Plague.   (I have not yet read either of these works but I was recently kindly given both of these works by a patron of my blog from New Delhi to whom I am very grateful and will, I hope, read them both this year.)

"The Guest" reminded me a lot of Frank O'Connor's very famous short story, "The Guest of the Nation".    Both are told from the point of view of soldiers fighting in a cause they only at best half believe in and barely understand the causes behind it.   Both jailers really believe in their hearts that their captives are simple men just like themselves, puppets.   In the world of the values which they understand it is very wrong to execute these men who are near brother to them.   "The Guest" is set, I am assuming, in Algeria.   The captive is described as an "Arab".  No name, no description, just as an "Arab".   The Arab committed a murder but one justified under the values his captor understands.   The jailer knows he is in danger form two quarters.  If he lets the man go, as he wants to, the authorities will give him a terrible punishment.  If he allows the captive to be executed, then the relatives of the man will target him for death.   He is trapped by the authorities on one hand and what he thinks are authentic values on the other side.  


"The Myth of Sisyphus" is a retelling of the classic myth as the fate of modern man.

"The Guest" is very well done and very much worth reading.   You can read it on line here.

Mel u