Review by Choice Review
Plagues never really end. As with wildfires, a spark can send pathogens burning through communities until they run out of fuel and retreat into dormancy, awaiting the right conditions for another conflagration. Over time, each recurring plague resurrects a familiar slate of human experiences: separation, anxiety, resignation, community, hope … a collective trauma and communal resilience Albert Camus masterfully captured in his allegorical novel The Plague (1947). Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, Camus scholars Alice Kaplan (Yale) and Laura Marris (a translator) reflect on what that novel might signify in the current moment. Across 13 insightful, deeply personal chapters, Kaplan and Marris explore the human side of communal trauma. Many chapters provide the sociohistorical context for understanding Camus, covering topics ranging from colonial cemeteries to toxic Oranian politics, the messy denouement of world war, and beyond. Other chapters trace the author's experiences and choices in writing the novel--his writer's block, narrative identity, and literary restraint--and how he was received by the literary establishment. Importantly, the authors avoid scholarly detachment and instead share their insightful, often vulnerable, reflections in evocative prose that serves to reinforce the deeply humanistic importance of Camus's thought. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Lane Alan Wilkinson, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Critic Kaplan (Looking for 'The Stranger') and translator Marris offer brisk and astute essays on Albert Camus's 1947 novel The Plague and its contemporary relevance in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors reflect on "how Camus could know so much about what we were living through: the official denials, the bureaucracy, the numbness, the end of travel, the monotony of waiting, and especially our separation from one another." In "Les Séparés," named after the novel's working title, Kaplan illuminates the role separation played in Camus's life and work. In "On Restraint," Marris writes of the "emotional register" of language in the novel and offers a close reading on the sentence level, while in "Half-Life," she visits cemeteries that inspired Camus and considers the impact of Covid on contemporary life: "I live in the world of this book. Now I understand I always did." A few of the essays are more strained ("The Essay Garden," for example, is inspired more by Hélène Cixous and feels a little in the weeds), but for the most part the book's conversational nature lends itself well to thoughtful personal reflections. This intelligent study goes a long way in highlighting Camus's enduring legacy. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Through the work of Camus, two scholars present "a guide to…moments where the written and the real collide." In this mélange of history, literary analysis, and memoir, the authors explore the intersection between a celebrated novel, current realities, scholarship, language, and the tricks that time and circumstance play on all of them. Seasoned literary historian Kaplan and poet and translator Marris, whose new translation of The Plague was published in 2021, team up to cultivate a deeper understanding of Camus' classic novel. In alternating short essays, they braid together their distinct sensibilities to offer fresh insight and added significance to a canonical mid-20th-century book. They examine the process of seeking out new evidence and making a new English translation of an accepted masterpiece amid a plague reminiscent of the one in Camus' novel. Enlarging the significance of a work long understood only as an allegory for Nazi occupation, Kaplan and Marris cast it as a more encompassing parable about all kinds of plagues, political as well as viral, and how people, they included, confront them. They also unearth interesting information about the novel's Algerian setting and, in keeping with Kaplan's previous studies of 20th-century French fiction and writers, about its conceptualization and realization. Throughout, the authors offer deft textual analyses of all aspects of The Plague, and Marris lets us in on the challenges a translator faces, many of them extending beyond the texts they struggle with to the places where they were written and where their stories take place. Some of the alternating short chapters don't sit easily with each other, and others possess a touch of idolatry in their approach to Camus. Nevertheless, this is a notable addition to the literature about an indispensable French author. A reflective set of short essays that will appeal to Camus fans and literary scholars. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
