Finally read "The Plague"

[MsAmerica]

The Plague, by Camus, was in book-news a bit in the last year or more, as people were looking for "relevant" reading during covid times. I was pretty sure I didn't want to own it, and it finally became available at the library.

I hated it. As I did The Stranger. While any random sentence is perfectly fine, overall it's dry, dour, tedious, and essentially plotless. So feel free to tell me what I'm missing. I hope he didn't win his Nobel on the basis of his novels.

I liked The Stranger/The Outsider. I found it best read with an awareness of philosophy than as a traditional novel/reading for the plot.

I didn’t like ‘A Little Life’ although I see people on mumsnet absolutely raving about it, and it was shortlisted for the man Booker. I thought it was garbage. Just taste, isn’t it.

Well, the whole point is that it's an extended metaphor/allegory for the nature of evil or Nazi occupation. Plus it depends if you read it in French or not.

So at its most basic reading Rieux = resistance Cottard =collaborator

and the ending warns that fascism can rear its ugly head again if we don't notice

the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Disclaimer: it's been 30 years since I read it

A fascism allegory and a bit heavy handed, if memory serves.

Oh god brings back memories of reading L'Etranger for French A Level! It was mercifully short. Wonder if I would appreciate it more nowadays but suspect not!

@SequinsandStiIettos

Well, the whole point is that it's an extended metaphor/allegory for the nature of evil or Nazi occupation. Plus it depends if you read it in French or not.

Okay, but it's BORING. To paraphrase Grand Hotel: People live, people die; nothing ever happens.

No, I wasn't reading it in French, but I like Guy De Maupassant even if I was reading that in English.