Small selection of books or films on viruses and pandemics to read or watch warm at home. To laugh, to be scared, or just to keep busy. Today, Plague by Albert Camus (France, 1947).
The story : In the 1940s, in Oran, Algeria, a strange disease declared itself: it killed rats in very large numbers, then humans. Dr. Bernard Rieux has little doubt: this is the plague. With the help of a group of friends and acquaintances, Rieux, faced with the authorities who are slow to react, will wage a relentless fight against the disease.
After having closed its “cycle of the absurd” (with, in particular, The Stranger), Camus, in the immediate post-war period, started with Plague a new cycle, that of “revolt”. Inspired, among others, by the Resistance, whom Camus rubbed shoulders with (he was the editor of the underground newspaper Combat), Plague can actually be read as the story of a group that resists a deadly plague and is present on every street corner. But the novel is also cold in the back when we rediscover it in this period of coronavirus.
Told in the form of a chronicle of daily life in an almost journalistic style, Plague presents indeed, and with astonishing clairvoyance, most of the aspects of life and security measures linked to the current health crisis: authorities who react late, containment measures, underestimation of the dangers linked to the epidemic … Everything was already “invented” by Camus (who had also documented cases of plague) and the novel, already breathless in what it tells of the struggle of humans against the plague, becomes all the more striking in its description of events.
The author’s classic, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, has seen renewed interest since the start of the coronavirus epidemic, ranking in France as one of the best sellers of digital books.
V. M.
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