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States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic
States of Plague examines Albert Camus’s novel as a palimpsest of pandemic life, an uncannily relevant account of the psychology and politics of a public health crisis.
As one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel The Plague has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus’s 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis.
In thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of The Plague in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment. Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel’s original allegory might resonate with a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic. They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity.
Both personal and eloquently written, States of Plague uncovers for us the mysterious way a novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on other possible futures.
As one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel The Plague has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus’s 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis.
In thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of The Plague in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment. Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel’s original allegory might resonate with a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic. They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity.
Both personal and eloquently written, States of Plague uncovers for us the mysterious way a novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on other possible futures.
152 pages, Hardcover
Published October 31, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 14, 2024
‘Camus allegorized war as plague, but plague, too, can be deployed as a political allegory.’
The Spring of 2020 shook up the world as the COVID pandemic swept in. For Laura Marris, this was extra unsettling as she first caught wind of it spreading while in the city of Oran doing research for a new translation of Albert Camus’ famous novel about the city of Oran under lockdown from a deadly disease, the aptly titled La Peste, or The Plague. Traveling with Laura was Alice Kaplan, who was teaching the novel at Yale, neither yet aware ‘how much more immersed we were going to become.’ Together they have written States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic, which features rotating essays between Laura Marris and Alice Kaplan to discuss The Plague on aspects including the use of language and the interplay of past and present that also captures the ‘moments where the written and the real collide.’ Deeply engaging and intellectually stimulating, this would appeal to academic interests as well as those with a general interest in Camus, making for an excellent overview of his life and his literary efforts in general, and was an absolute joy to read alongside the novel.
The sections from Laura Marris tend to focus most on Camus’ use of language as well as her thoughts on translating the novel and her reasons for many of the choices. It was also interesting to hear about how this was basically her pandemic project, translating a fictional account of what was basically going on around her in real time. She discusses how she tried to avoid making it feel couched in the language of the current pandemic (scourge instead of pandemic, serum instead of vaccine, etc) and be as faithful to Camus’ intentions as possible. A big aspect is her focus on his use of restraint in the book and all the implications, which I have written on at length here in reviewing the book for those who are interested. By holding back the dazzle for a moment,’ she writes about how the restraint goes beyond the themes and into the experience of reading as well, ‘a writer can let someone look directly through the page, at the part of the world that hurts.’ She also discusses how it plays into so many of his larger literary and philosophical ideas. As he wrote in
For Camus, the book was about achieving that reconstruction of life. Discussing Camus’ own experience with tuberculosis, she analyzes the novel as a way of capturing how ‘his own struggles with illness made him confront his own mortality.’
I also enjoyed her segments on Tarrou, who she calls her favorite character (he is mine as well) and how he not only breaks her heart but Riuex’s as well. She points out that she points out, at the end, it is through Tarrou that Riuex recognizes most that the plague isn’t just some abstract idea they are fighting but concrete and violent and that ‘a plague can never be an abstraction when it takes human lives’ But also her discussion on how ‘Tarrou has to teach the hardest lesson: insignificance is a gateway into human life, and it’s also a gateway out.’ In this way she examines how little narratives within the narrative, such as the man Tarrou chronicles who spits on cats, are seemingly insignificant but also make up for the reality of life. That every individual life matters and has a story to tell, then tying this to his pursuit against death.
Alice Kaplan also has much to say about Tarrou, with her chapters addressing Camus’ world and personal history and passing it through the novel and into discussions of our modern pandemic. Kaplan discusses how Tarrou represents a major theme of Camus about social responsibility as a form of protest. Quoting an analysis of the novel by Jacqueline Rose, she shows how Camus believes we are all responsible for one another:
I greatly enjoyed the segments that discuss our current issues in relation to the novel, though felt that there could have been a lot more of that. Having been written while it was all ongoing, though, I suppose not enough had been sorted out. I would love to see a book that does address this directly however. Though she does discuss how much separation was a major theme of the novel, originally intended to be titled ‘Les Séparés’, or The Separated Ones, and looks at how Zoom and other technology allowed people to be connected still, though as a pale imitation of actually being together.
Her chapters are quite interesting, discussing a lot of history about Camus and how it relates to the book. Mme Rieux, for instance, is based on Camus’ own mother. He had transcribed a conversation he had with his mother at the outbreak of WWII, and that conversation appears in the novel nearly verbatim, only substituting the word “war” for the word “plague. Another interesting thing I learned was that the refugee camps in Oran following the Spanish Civil War were the basis of the camps for the sick in the novel. She discusses much of Camus’ ideas of revolution and protest, though also that he did not support the Algerian Revolution which is quite disappointing. She does paint Camus as a complex figure, and I enjoyed learning a lot here. It could be said there is a bit of idolization of Camus here, which was quite noticeable reading it alongside Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction which often feels rather antagonistic towards him, but it never seems saccharine or misguided in glossing over anything.
States of Plague is a fascinating read that offers a lot of insight, both textual and historical. I enjoyed the writings by both authors here (I really loved Marris’ essays on translation best, but I am biased) and I would encourage anyone who has read The Plague to give this a read. It is a bit short but it is certainly a wealth of knowledge, like having taken a college course on the novel itself. This was a great companion for reading The Plague.
4.5/5
The Spring of 2020 shook up the world as the COVID pandemic swept in. For Laura Marris, this was extra unsettling as she first caught wind of it spreading while in the city of Oran doing research for a new translation of Albert Camus’ famous novel about the city of Oran under lockdown from a deadly disease, the aptly titled La Peste, or The Plague. Traveling with Laura was Alice Kaplan, who was teaching the novel at Yale, neither yet aware ‘how much more immersed we were going to become.’ Together they have written States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic, which features rotating essays between Laura Marris and Alice Kaplan to discuss The Plague on aspects including the use of language and the interplay of past and present that also captures the ‘moments where the written and the real collide.’ Deeply engaging and intellectually stimulating, this would appeal to academic interests as well as those with a general interest in Camus, making for an excellent overview of his life and his literary efforts in general, and was an absolute joy to read alongside the novel.
The sections from Laura Marris tend to focus most on Camus’ use of language as well as her thoughts on translating the novel and her reasons for many of the choices. It was also interesting to hear about how this was basically her pandemic project, translating a fictional account of what was basically going on around her in real time. She discusses how she tried to avoid making it feel couched in the language of the current pandemic (scourge instead of pandemic, serum instead of vaccine, etc) and be as faithful to Camus’ intentions as possible. A big aspect is her focus on his use of restraint in the book and all the implications, which I have written on at length here in reviewing the book for those who are interested. By holding back the dazzle for a moment,’ she writes about how the restraint goes beyond the themes and into the experience of reading as well, ‘a writer can let someone look directly through the page, at the part of the world that hurts.’ She also discusses how it plays into so many of his larger literary and philosophical ideas. As he wrote in
‘‘Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight distortion that is the mark of both art and protest…Art is an impossible demand given expression and form.’
For Camus, the book was about achieving that reconstruction of life. Discussing Camus’ own experience with tuberculosis, she analyzes the novel as a way of capturing how ‘his own struggles with illness made him confront his own mortality.’
I also enjoyed her segments on Tarrou, who she calls her favorite character (he is mine as well) and how he not only breaks her heart but Riuex’s as well. She points out that she points out, at the end, it is through Tarrou that Riuex recognizes most that the plague isn’t just some abstract idea they are fighting but concrete and violent and that ‘a plague can never be an abstraction when it takes human lives’ But also her discussion on how ‘Tarrou has to teach the hardest lesson: insignificance is a gateway into human life, and it’s also a gateway out.’ In this way she examines how little narratives within the narrative, such as the man Tarrou chronicles who spits on cats, are seemingly insignificant but also make up for the reality of life. That every individual life matters and has a story to tell, then tying this to his pursuit against death.
Alice Kaplan also has much to say about Tarrou, with her chapters addressing Camus’ world and personal history and passing it through the novel and into discussions of our modern pandemic. Kaplan discusses how Tarrou represents a major theme of Camus about social responsibility as a form of protest. Quoting an analysis of the novel by Jacqueline Rose, she shows how Camus believes we are all responsible for one another:
‘the plague will continue to crawl out of the woodwork—out of bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers—as long as human subjects do not question the cruelty and injustice of their social arrangements. We are all accountable for the ills of the world.’
I greatly enjoyed the segments that discuss our current issues in relation to the novel, though felt that there could have been a lot more of that. Having been written while it was all ongoing, though, I suppose not enough had been sorted out. I would love to see a book that does address this directly however. Though she does discuss how much separation was a major theme of the novel, originally intended to be titled ‘Les Séparés’, or The Separated Ones, and looks at how Zoom and other technology allowed people to be connected still, though as a pale imitation of actually being together.
Her chapters are quite interesting, discussing a lot of history about Camus and how it relates to the book. Mme Rieux, for instance, is based on Camus’ own mother. He had transcribed a conversation he had with his mother at the outbreak of WWII, and that conversation appears in the novel nearly verbatim, only substituting the word “war” for the word “plague. Another interesting thing I learned was that the refugee camps in Oran following the Spanish Civil War were the basis of the camps for the sick in the novel. She discusses much of Camus’ ideas of revolution and protest, though also that he did not support the Algerian Revolution which is quite disappointing. She does paint Camus as a complex figure, and I enjoyed learning a lot here. It could be said there is a bit of idolization of Camus here, which was quite noticeable reading it alongside Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction which often feels rather antagonistic towards him, but it never seems saccharine or misguided in glossing over anything.
States of Plague is a fascinating read that offers a lot of insight, both textual and historical. I enjoyed the writings by both authors here (I really loved Marris’ essays on translation best, but I am biased) and I would encourage anyone who has read The Plague to give this a read. It is a bit short but it is certainly a wealth of knowledge, like having taken a college course on the novel itself. This was a great companion for reading The Plague.
4.5/5
December 29, 2023
Immediately after re-reading Camus's The Plague, I read Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris's States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic, which provided useful background information on the site of the novel (the port of Oran in Algeria) and Albert Camus's state of mind being separated from his wife during the war.
July 18, 2023
I absolutely loved reading this book. It was a balm during some complicated times--not just the pandemic, but the ways in which we think about and value literature as we come up against confrontations in education and the humanities. I could read this book again and again and would love to read more like it, contextualizing our lives and spirits in the framework of literature. This one I'm going to buy for my personal library.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.
December 19, 2022
This is a gorgeous, engaging book about what it's like to read The Plague in our contemporary world, filled with its own plagues, both human and human-created. I love both Alice Kaplan's and Laura Marris's voices -- and it's wonderful, how these short chapters, in alternating voices, offer distinct paths into a landscape (Camus' and ours) of loss, courage, and fortitude. This is a perfect book for someone who cherishes thoughtful, genuine voices, and the mingling of the personal with larger questions of culture and environment. SO deserving of praise!
May 31, 2022
States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic, by Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris, was an eye-opening read for me, combining literary criticism with personal experience and all points in between.
A lot of the best literary criticism includes some elements of the author's personal life, whether interactions with the text or other lived experiences. Yet they often do a bit of one then a bit of the other without a great deal of really weaving them together. Which works quite well, the personal is usually used as a springboard into the textual criticism. Here, however, the entwining of the personal and the literary criticism, of the literary and the cultural criticism, and of two writers doing those things, makes this an exceptional example of how a text can speak to so many people and situations.
As I often do when reading a book like this, I reread the text being examined. In this case, twice, once before reading this book and again after, mainly because I felt like it was a completely different book (or I was a completely different reader). Rereading The Plague before this book was something that really spoke to me. I tried to remember as much as I could of historical context but it was mostly my interaction with the text while living through a pandemic. Reading this book expanded, through their personal experiences, my personal engagement with Camus' text. But it was the actual literary criticism, juxtaposed with what the world is experiencing right now, that really made both this book and Camus' book come alive for me. So reading it again after this book gave me more insight and brought me to several new ways of thinking about certain characters and scenes.
I would recommend this to any reader who has an interest in Camus' The Plague, whether because of our pandemic, its literary value, or a combination of the two. I would suggest, unless you're intimately familiar with it, reading The Plague before reading this, you will get so much more out of it. That said, I think as long as you remember the novel in general, Kaplan and Marris will still offer you new ways to understand our world as well as the world of the work.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
A lot of the best literary criticism includes some elements of the author's personal life, whether interactions with the text or other lived experiences. Yet they often do a bit of one then a bit of the other without a great deal of really weaving them together. Which works quite well, the personal is usually used as a springboard into the textual criticism. Here, however, the entwining of the personal and the literary criticism, of the literary and the cultural criticism, and of two writers doing those things, makes this an exceptional example of how a text can speak to so many people and situations.
As I often do when reading a book like this, I reread the text being examined. In this case, twice, once before reading this book and again after, mainly because I felt like it was a completely different book (or I was a completely different reader). Rereading The Plague before this book was something that really spoke to me. I tried to remember as much as I could of historical context but it was mostly my interaction with the text while living through a pandemic. Reading this book expanded, through their personal experiences, my personal engagement with Camus' text. But it was the actual literary criticism, juxtaposed with what the world is experiencing right now, that really made both this book and Camus' book come alive for me. So reading it again after this book gave me more insight and brought me to several new ways of thinking about certain characters and scenes.
I would recommend this to any reader who has an interest in Camus' The Plague, whether because of our pandemic, its literary value, or a combination of the two. I would suggest, unless you're intimately familiar with it, reading The Plague before reading this, you will get so much more out of it. That said, I think as long as you remember the novel in general, Kaplan and Marris will still offer you new ways to understand our world as well as the world of the work.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
November 21, 2022
The recent Covid pandemic resulted in renewed interest in Albert Camus’ novel The Plague and many read it or re-read it and afterwards discussed its relevance to our contemporary world, eager to discover whether it could illuminate our current predicament. Certainly I re-read it and found it resonated strongly with me. Alice Kaplan and Laura Morris have written individual responses to the novel and in alternating chapters offer short essays on the book’s history, significance and relevance. A combination of literary criticism and analysis, sociology, history and personal experience, the book is a thoughtful, insightful and interesting exploration of Camus’ writing and I very much enjoyed it. Recommended for literary scholars and lay-readers alike; there’s something for everyone here.
July 2, 2022
I read French Lessons by Alice Kaplan when I was in high school 30 years ago. I've since become a translator. I haven't read The Plague in decades but was spurred to do so by this book (I've only just started).
I think most French people have made fun of Emmanuelle Macron for saying "nous sommes en guerre" against the novel coronavirus. I mean, when you compare Covid to present-day Syria, non, quoi. Camus' book was an allegory comparing the spread of plague to the spread of Naziism. The parallels drawn to the present day here are tenuous at best.
Still, I learned that Camus was chronically ill all his life and about how that informed his work.
I think most French people have made fun of Emmanuelle Macron for saying "nous sommes en guerre" against the novel coronavirus. I mean, when you compare Covid to present-day Syria, non, quoi. Camus' book was an allegory comparing the spread of plague to the spread of Naziism. The parallels drawn to the present day here are tenuous at best.
Still, I learned that Camus was chronically ill all his life and about how that informed his work.
December 5, 2022
(3.5 stars) I can sort of relate to this work, as I also read Camus’ The Plague during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors were researching other aspects of the work, but it took on a far different meaning with the advent of COVID-19. Instead of analyzing the allegorical nature of the work (Camus’ perspective on World War II), this work looked at the literal definition of a plague and how it tied into Camus’ writing. Perhaps this book doesn’t rate as highly if I hadn’t read Camus when I did. Still, a good concise read.
January 2, 2023
This was well-written and interesting set of Covid 19 reflections on The Plague from two capable interpreters of Camus. Of personal benefit for me were deeper looks at Oran as a city and its own political history, and why it was a good setting for the novel. Likewise, Marris's discussion of Camus's experience with tuberculosis and how that was connected to his writing of The Plague and gave a language to his view of the ongoing human capacity for evil.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews