A Very Influential Post WWII Novel
"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.
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.
Mel u
