I finished
The Plague yesterday. The following is the review I have just put up on Goodreads:
Quote:
Read just as a story, this book could seem rather dry and dreary. However, read as a metaphor for France's occupation by the Nazis during the Second World War, it is gripping.
In the early pages, Oran sounds to be dry and dreary itself. "Treeless, glamourless, soulless, the town of Oran ends by seeming restful, and, after a while, you go complacently to sleep there." (page 7)
Once the situation becomes clear and the inhabitants become prisoners in their own town, all the best and worst of human nature is on display, as in any crisis.
"On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness." (page 118)
I read the "sanitary squads" as a metaphor for the Resistance: dangerous work, done by volunteers. "... they knew it was the only thing to do, and the unthinkable thing would then have been not to have brought themselves to do it." (page 118)
The populace in general simply endured the situation, walking about the streets aimlessly: "... the sound of a huge concourse of people marking time, a never-ending, stifling drone that, gradually swelling, filled the town from end to end, and evening after evening, gave its truest, mournfullest expression to the blind endurance which had ousted love from all our hearts." (page 165)
At the end of the book, when the plague has withdrawn and people are permitted to return to Oran, there is great happiness as people separated by the situation are reunited. But of course there are those who return to find that the person from whom they were separated has died. And they of course stand for the people who, at the end of the War, learned that someone they hoped had survived had not, and while all around them were rejoicing, they were plunged into grief.
"For the mothers, husbands, wives and lovers who had lost all joy, now that the loved one lay under a layer of quicklime in a death-pit, or was a mere handful of indistinctive ashes in a grey mound, the plague had not yet ended." (page 260)
My husband's uncle was a prisoner of war of the Japanese in the Second World War, and went through several years of terrible experiences with his comrades, only to die a few days before the Japanese surrender. So his family, and his young wife, were waiting for him to come home, only to learn several months after his death what had happened. Such grief after the hope that all was well would be hard to bear, especially in the midst of others' happiness.
A grim and powerful book.
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On the matter of the peripheral part played by women in the story, I rather suspect that to Camus women were simply sexual objects. He had a reputation as a "handsome and energetic charmer of the opposite sex ... (whose) conquests were legion". (Introduction by David Bellos in the Everyman's Library version I read.)
I doubt that he had women friends, or that he actually liked and respected women, so therefore he would not think them worthy to play a role of any importance in his story.