Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
It's been a pleasure reading the many excellent and informative posts preceding this one. I enjoyed the book to a degree and thought it was good but it didn't entrance me. I liked the setting and the descriptions of certain parts of the town for almost the opposite reason as Camus chose it. To me this barren Algerian coastal city seemed exotic, mysterious and interesting whereas to Camus it was an ugly, boring wasteland. His prejudice and negativity towards it irked me at times but I suppose it made sense on a more philosophical level.
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Camus wrote several essays on Oran, in
The Myth of Sisyphus, and they were generally unflattering. You will notice that many of these sentiments were echoed in
The Plague.
The Minotaur or The Stop In Oran
He waxed lyrical about the great cites of Europe. Then, pace Oran, he said "In order to flee poetry and yet recapture the peace of stones, other deserts are needed, other spots without soul and without reprieve. Oran is one of these."
In
The Street, he said "The streets of Oran are doomed to dust, pebbles, and heat. If it rains, there is a deluge and a sea of mud. But rain or shine, the shops have the same extravagant and absurd look. All the bad taste of Europe and the Orient has managed to converge in them."
In
The Desert In Oran, he said "Obliged to live facing a wonderful landscape, the people of Oran have overcome this fearful ordeal by covering their city with very ugly constructions. One expects to find a city open to the sea, washed and refreshed by the evening breeze. And aside from the Spanish quarter, one finds a walled town that turns its back to the sea, that has been built up by turning back on itself like a snail."
This dislike seems to have been specific to Oran; when he talked about Algiers, the city he grew up in, in the essay
Summer In Algiers, "The loves we share with a city are often secret loves. Old walled towns like Paris, Prague, and even Florence are closed in on themselves and hence limit the world that belongs to them. But Algiers (together with certain other privileged places such as cities on the sea) opens to the sky like a mouth or a wound. In Algiers one loves the commonplaces: the sea at the end of every street, a certain volume of sunlight..."
If you enjoyed the description of Oran in The Plague, you may enjoy his last novel The First Man ( Le Premier homme), an autobiographical novel about his childhood as a dirt-poor colon in Algiers. When I read The First Man, I was amazed that someone could rise from that background to become such a great writer.