The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

I don’t think this one needs much explanation. Anne Frank lived in Amsterdam, where she moved as a child from Frankfurt. When the Nazis sent a summons for her older sister to report to a German “work camp,” she and her family went into hiding in an annex stowed away in the back of her father’s office. She lived there for a little over two years with her family and four others: Otto’s buisiness partner Mr. van Daan, his wife Mrs. van Daan, their son Peter, and a local dentist Mr. Dussel (the names are all pseudonyms; the Van Danns were Van Pels and Dussel’s last name was Pfeffer. But I know them better by the names Anne gave them, so I’ve used them here).

During her time in the Annex and a bit before, Anne kept a diary where she recorded her thoughts and feelings, alongside events both quotidian and newsworthy. Life in the annex, with its myriad indignities, frustrations ,and small joys are recorded in great and evocative detail, interspersed with news gleaned from their helpers or the contraband radio. Every entry is addressed to Kitty, a fictitious figure that Anne invented to make her diary feel more conversational.

There is little to say about the structure, since it’s a diary and not beholden to pacing or format in any real sense. Still, it is an engaging read. Anne was a gifted writer, and very well would have been famous in her own right, had not the tragic and evil events of World War II taken her life before she had a chance to bring her gifts to fruition. She also speaks with much frankness (I’m sorry for the pun; I can’t think of a more approriate word) about her sexual feelings and maturity, which is surprising from a book of its time (apparently these passages were excised on original publication and only added back later).

The one other thought that struck me as I read, which never occured to me when first reading it as a teenager, was what it must have been like for Otto Frank to read and edit his dead daughter’s diary. Her love for him is clea,r but not everything she wrote is flattering ,and she was quite hard on her mother. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to do that. It was truly an act of bravery, and of love.

Anne’s diary should be required reading in school. It remains accessible and humanizes an awful period in history that is so huge, so monstrous in its evil, that it can almost feel impersonal. Six million murdered jews is a loss on a scale too large to easily wrap your head around. But thinking of that one girl, with her jokes and her dreams, murdered for the stupidest and pettiest possible reason, gives a foothold to the tragedy.

La Peste (The Plague) - Albert Camus

I’ve been wanting to reread Camus’ La Peste for a while, and now seemed like a pretty good time, under the circumstances.

As the title suggests, the novel tells a story about an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the Algerian city of Oran in the 1940s. It spans the entire outbreak, from the initial cases foretold by the sudden death of the city’s rat population to its eventual dissipation, and takes a holistic approach by attempting to capture the spirit of the entire city rather than focusing exclusively on a few characters. That being said, a few figures do feature prominently in the story, particularly the laconic physician Bernard Rieux, who becomes the first to suspect that the disease he is treating is the plague. Other characters include Jean Tarrou, a mysterious figure who arrives in town shortly before the plague and keeps copious notes of his encounters; Raymond Rambert, a journalist from out of town who is caught in the city’s quarantine; Joseph Grand ,a middle-aged clerk who has spent years writing and re-writing the first sentence of a novel; and Cottard, a withdrawn and sullen man who is strangely enlivened by the plague and the demands it places on him.

Though it is eventually revealed to have been written by one of the characters, the text presents itself as an objective statement of fact, musing on motive and experiences of the characters without diving directly into their perspectives. As is typical with Camus, the prose regularly diverges from the immediate narrative to expound on events from a more philosophical approach. I often find this sort of storytelling irritating, or at least dull, but Camus has a gift for it and counts among my favorite authors despite—or maybe even because of—this predilection.

While I have read La Peste before in its English translation, this was my first time reading it in French. Many years passed between the two readings, but I would say the translation was quite faithful, as I found the tone of the book to be much as I remembered. Still, it’s always satisfying to hear an author’s words unfiltered where possible, which is why I’ve enjoyed revisiting some of Camus’ works now that my French is sufficiently advanced to grasp it. Like his other novel,s this one is worth reading in any language.