Sometime around four o’clock this morning I read the final pages of Albert Camus’s La Peste, a 1947 existentialist novel that chronicles a city’s year-long battle with bubonic plague. I had aimed to finish it over the weekend, but some combination of the day getting away from me and my having trouble sleeping meant that I was up in the middle of the night and figured there was no better time to swallow what I hope will be my last helping of depressing philosophy for some time.
I started the novel 51 days ago, and I’ve got to say that it was a slog. Although it’s only 350 pages, the writing is difficult with sophisticated vocabulary, elaborate grammar, and sentences reaching nearly half a page in length. The work is recognized as a classic, with lots of subtext and many analogies to World War II and Europe’s occupation by Nazi Germany (“the brown plague” according to remarks by Camus outside the novel). You can read good summaries of the book here and ici. It enjoyed a revival in popularity with the arrival of Covid in 2020, and I acknowledge that the observations Camus makes about the human spirit and condition in the context of a long epidemic response hold up reasonably well today. This conversation with philosopher Robert Zaretsky is an example of folks finding renewed relevance in the book.
La Peste was hard to read on many levels. I was interested in it for the first 100 pages or so, but it became oppressive from there. One central theme is human impotency, an idea which always sours my disposition. The characters lack any depth or warmth, as we learn almost nothing about them. And the book contains lengthy digressions as the author delivers polemics against the Church or the death penalty. But completing it felt like an accomplishment to be proud of, so I stubbornly plowed ahead, 10 pages at a sitting, until I was done. Hooray ?
One bonus outcome is that I noted unfamiliar vocabulary words as I went, so I now have a collection of some 400+ words that I can study. I might start a running series of posts sharing some of them here. I am curious to see upon reflection how many of these are fairly common words that had escaped me to date, and how many are obscure words that I am likely not to come upon outside of high literature. Stay tuned …