States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic

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.)