Thursday 13 April 2023

#ThrowbackThursday. The Plague

 

Camus, Albert "The Plague" (French: La Peste) - 1947

My favourite French book of all times.

North Africa, a French town in Algeria, sometime in the 1940s. The rats come first, then the plague follows.

Albert Camus is my favourite French author, the language he uses is fantastic, so precise yet so poetic.

Read my original review here

Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times".

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

19 comments:

  1. I have never read anything by Camus, but it looks like I should!

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    1. Thanks, Gypsi. I can only recommend him, he is my one and only favourite French author. And I always wish everyone else to love him just as much as I do.

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  2. I so need to read this book! It's been on my classics list forever.

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    1. Definitely a good idea to pull him out, Lark.

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  3. I read this back in 2020(!) and thought it was outstandingly good. My review is here:

    https://cyberkittenspot.blogspot.com/2020/11/just-finished-reading-plague-by-albert.html

    BIG fan of his philosophy too... [grin]

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    1. Thanks, Kitten. It's been longer for me, obviously, but it still rings true. I had to think about it a lot during Covid time.

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    2. And yes, one should be a fan of his philosophy!

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    3. It was weird reading it around the time of the Pandemic. I kept stopping and saying to myself: Yup, that's real.... Yup, THAT happened..... I think it made it even more powerful. The build-up was fantastic I thought. Definitely a haunting novel.

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    4. I totally can imagine, Kitten. As I said, it came back to me a lot during Covid time, so it must have even have more impact reading it right then.

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  4. I have only read "The Stranger," but found it a bit depressing. But you are right about the language.

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    1. I don't think any of Camus' books are cheerful, that was just not his life. And The Stranger can be depressing but it explains a lot. I read it with my international book club, we were all foreigners in a strange land.

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    2. It made me a bit angry. There was too much blaming other people and situations going on.

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    3. I didn't see it like that. And if I look at the way people behaved during the Covid pandemic, I think they were still very mild.

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    4. I did not notice much change in people's behavior here during Covid, but that might have been because our Covid restrictions were not nearly as strict as in some European countries.

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    5. Maybe not in your area but I heard from many American friends that it was not very different over there.

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    6. Each state reacted very differently to the pandemic, so no wonder we had many different regulations.

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    7. Similar in Germany though not as huge a difference since we always still had some regulations that affected the whole country.

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  5. I read this a while ago and liked it. More than the Stranger.

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    1. I think, The Stranger rings too many bells for any expat, Lisbeth. But The Plague is definitely my favourite book by Albert Camus.

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