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Grand ,a middle-aged clerk who has spent years writing and re-writing the first sentence of a novel; and Cottard, a withdrawn and sullen man who is strangely enlivened by the plague and the demands it places on him.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.

La Chute (The Fall) - Albert Camus

You can always find a reason to kill a man. It is, however, impossible to justify that he live.*

This was the first Camus novel I’ve read exclusively in French. I read The Plague (i.e. La Peste) several years ago in translation, and The Outsider in university before picking up the original L’Etranger. As such, while I would say La Chute is the most challenging of his books I’ve read, I’m aware this could be in part because I read it without a translation to fall back on.

However, I don’t think the complexity comes from the language alone. In his other novels, Camus manages to convey a nuanced philosophy, but he does so through a fairly straightforward narrative. La Chute, however, barely has a plot at all. The book takes the form of a series of largely one-sided conversations with an unnamed narrator, who lives in Amsterdam and works as a self-styled juge-pénitent. Through his musings, we catch snippets of story about his life in Paris as a prominent lawyer representing the downtrodden (widows and orphans, he calls them), and an experience in which he bears witness to a suicide takes a prominent thematic role. But for the most part, the text is simply a recounting of a meandering philosophy, touching on points as disparate as love, work, and the need to be valued.

Camus also plays with the concept of the unreliable narrator more so than in the other books of his I’ve read. The narrator of L’Etranger demonstrates a fair bit of odd behavior, but I didn’t doubt the veracity of what he said. In La Chute, however, it’s hard to say whether anything we’re told is true, as it’s being recounted to us second-hand, and the narrator even makes a point of telling us he’s lied on a couple of occasions. The uncertainty embedded in the narrative is hinted at in one passage:

Truth, like light, blinds you. Lies, however, exist in a twilight in which each object can be clearly seen.**

All in all, I enjoyed La Chute less than Camus’ other books. Likely, this is because of the genre in which it’s written, since I’ve never been a big fan of philosophical novels (I’ve still yet to make it more than 50 pages into Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). That being said, Camus remains a great writer, and his talent shines through here, even if I’m more likely to pick up La Peste or L’Etranger again in the future.

*il y a toujours des raisons au meurtre d'un homme. Il est, au contraire, impossible de justifier qu'il vivre.

**La vérité, comme la lumière, aveugle. La mensonge, au contraire, est un bien crépuscule, qui met chaque objet en valeur.