I'm looking forward to our online discussion of Albert Camus' The Plague tonight! To prepare for that, you might want to take a look at Steve Coll's Daily Comment, "Camus and the Political Tests of a Pandemic" in the May 19 New Yorker. (I tip my jaunty beret to Bruce Dunne for flagging that.) Coll discusses the novel's roots in the author's work for the French Resistance, and closes by quoting historian and Camus biographer Robert Zaretsky's observation that while The Plague has been criticized ever since its 1947 publication for "being heavy and overly moralistic," that criticism "has not aged nearly as well as the novel."
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Thanks, Steve, for these links. The Steve Coll article will make more sense to me after I receive and read my Robin Buss translation, being shipped from UK. The "virus of Fascism" article did not grab me, perhaps because my mind has been on our AIDS experience: At the time of our discussion, I was finishing off a history of the gay rights movement, so I was preoccupied with the politics of plague on that basis. Dudley Clendinen/Adam Nagourney, Out for Good. (I am ready to give my copy away to anyone who asks.) PF
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