— (La Peste) The Plague by Albert Camus - a review

The opening is astounding. Some three to four pages of small print in which Camus attempts to describe his Oran, the setting of the novel. The following is an extract:

Certainly nothing is commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn till night and then proceeding to fritter away at card tables, in cafes, and in small talk what time is left for living. Nevertheless, there still exist towns and countries where people have now and again an inkling of something different. In general it doesn’t change their lives. Still, they have had an intimation, and that’s so much to the good. Oran, however, seems to be a town without intimations; in other words, completely modern. Hence I see no need to dwell on the manner of loving in our town. The men and women consume each other rapidly in what is called ‘the act of love’, or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these extremes. That, too, is not exceptional. At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love each other without knowing much about it.

Camus describes a collective affliction. The plague occupies the town as surely and rigidly and impersonally as a Panzer Division.

And the description is about what happens to the town, the community, as well as the single individuals. The narrator is an individual, and we meet some others, Rieux the doctor, Tarrou and their friends and colleagues, although none of these seem to be fully explored or realised. Camus’ theme is society, it’s illusions and attempts at identity. We read about the indifference of the many; the general consensus that the responsibility for the plague lies elsewhere.

We read about the events of the plague. What happens is reported. There is nothing more than that. Although the progress of the spread and decline of the plague are natural we are always conscious that the plague is a metaphor or an allegory, perhaps a series of metaphors for the Nazi invasion and occupation, or for any thing or concept that imprisons us and takes away our freedom or our expectations.

Camus has a story to tell but he also has a message. Now that God is no longer part of our equation we have to take our destiny into our own hands. Prayer will not defend our freedom. And involvement in the death of others, directly or indirectly, will only add to our problems and not even begin to penetrate the absurdity of our situation.

This post also concerns the writer, Albert Camus

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— Do Publishers Know Anything About Literature?

Tom McCarthy’s article in TimesOnline takes mainstream publishers to task:
. . . the art press Bookworks has just commissioned a series of novels to be guest edited by the artist-writer Stewart Home; the art publisher Sternberg Press recently won acclaim from the TLS for Bedlam, a novel by Jennifer Higgie, the editor of the [...]

— Is Literature Supposed to be Convenient?

John Liechty has a piece about the Orion Publishing Company’s decision to edit a series of classic books, stripping them down to around 30% to 40% of their original length.
Ray Bradbury foresees a time when books will be burned, or changed, or “corrected” – when Poe and Shakespeare will have the soul cut out of [...]

— Bjork on Dylan

Asked if she was looking forward to appearing on the same bill as Dylan, Bjork said:
I’ve never really gotten into him. His voice is too nasal. And it’s like literature . . .
Rolling stone Mag

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— On the way to Hay

Tomorrow we leave for Hay on Wye at the request of artsWOM and sponsored by SkyARTS. The object is to blog about the festival, or aspects of it that we get to see.
Very few expectations, apart from the fact that Bill Clinton called it ‘the Woodstock of the mind’. Does that mean we should expect [...]

— More Loose Ends Than A Grass Skirt

Germaine Greer on who wrote Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus?
Literature courses in the US are oddly skewed towards novels because few undergraduates are required to read any poetry. If Lauritsen had read a sufficient quantity of poetry, he would know better than to state that the monster’s famous statement that he will “glut the maw [...]

— The responsibility of writers

I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: “Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”
Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes [...]

— The Prison of National Vanity

At the Same Time is a collection of posthumous writings by Susan Sontag. Jeremy Harding at The Nation, finishes his review like this:
It is an act of worship at the shrine of literature and an admission that the kind of writing she most admires may be a dying art, stifled by “our debauched culture,” which [...]

— The Mutt’s Nuts

The current censorship debate is, as usual, fuelled mainly by people who haven’t read the book - The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron - and have no intention of reading it.
Dana Nilsson, for example, a teacher and librarian from Durango, Colorado, does not seem to have noticed that the objectionable word in the [...]

— Who is the greatest living writer of the British Isles?

How do we determine literary greatness? This is the question Andrew Motion asks in an online feature in the Arts’ Council Arts Debate.
The David Cohen Prize for Literature is awarded every two years to a writer from the UK or Ireland in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in literature.
You get a chance to comment and [...]