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The Plague by Albert Camus has become relevant for writers, readers and thinkers once again

The Plague by Albert Camus – one of my all-time favourites – has become a relevant book during the advent of COVID-19, but especially in late March, when the disease has taken a great toll in Europe.

The Plague by Albert Camus – one of my all-time favourites – has become a relevant book during the advent of COVID-19, but especially in late March, when the disease has taken a great toll in Europe.

I first came across The Plague in the summer of 1984 after touring France, Spain and Morocco with a group of fellow idealists. We were college students from Canada, Britain and the U.S. who were staying at the Université Grenoble Alpes to discover and understand Arabic and French culture. In our free time, we often talked about French literature. Of course, Camus and Sartre (the writer’s former friend, who later became an enemy) were the hippest topics as we ate pigs’ brains in the university’s cafeteria at lunch. Well, at least the morning coffees and cheeses were amazing.   

Camus seemed especially popular with the students on the left in the summer of 1984. But given the author’s earlier dismissal of an independent Algeria coupled with the anti-revolutionary stance he defended in The Rebel (L'Homme révolté) he wasn’t exactly on the left, but nor was Camus positioned on the right. However, an Iranian student who described himself as a communist often walked around the campus in Grenoble with a copy of Camus’ L'Étranger stuffed down the front of his trousers, only to take the book out frequently and wave it around. A friend of his told me he was crazy.   

When I came back home to Alberta, I read L'Étranger and La Peste at 19 after sunning in Grenoble, Marseilles and Marrakech during the summer, but the complete exercise was more fashion than function. I used the book to remember those great times in Europe. Also, I needed to calm my nerves in the weeks before attending college in Calgary. Years later, I revisited the book. This time, I discovered The Plague contained much deeper ideas than I first realized, with profound themes of suffering, resilience and survival. Predictably, the book has resurfaced in the Coronavirus Era. Albert Camus is a literary hero once again.

Alain de Botton in the New York Times said Camus thought the act of being alive always meant the necessity of dwelling in a continual emergency. Camus believed humanity was continually subjected to the possibilities of frailty. But de Botton imagined Camus’s summation of absurdity had led us to a “tragicomic redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from judgment and moralizing to joy and gratitude.”

Jonah Raskin in CounterPunch read the book while living under quarantine in Northern California. This spring, he was fascinated with this novel set in Oran on the coast of Algeria – the North African country was the author’s birthplace. The book offered a snapshot of a population living with widespread anxiety, where they were trying to understand the unfathomable as the bubonic plague spread throughout the streets of Oran. In reality, the city of Oran had suffered returning bouts of the plague throughout history, even as recently as 2003.

Like myself, Konrad Yakabuski in the Globe and Mail was introduced to The Plague as a teenager, since it was on his Grade 12 reading list. However, unlike me, Yakabuski saw the book’s purpose immediately. He said reading The Plague was a “transformative experience that lit a burning desire within me to figure out the meaning of life.”

Camus researched plagues throughout history before writing this novel and discovered all plagues – whether literal or metaphorical – have common elements, such as denial mixed with fear. But there’s also a positive side, as the gaps of separation – such as class, race and other differentiations – vanish when everyone in the city must collectively deal with the spread of this disease. There’s a shared defiance exhibited in The Plague as the citizens of Oran collectively struggle against the spread of this disease – all having the shared realization that they are all equally strolling along a roadway with uncertainties ahead.