Talk Back

[jeffcon0]

I read the Stranger in college and I loved it. I remembered that I loved it when I was in the used bookstore and saw The Plague for $5 so I picked it up.

I'm really not sure if I would like the Stranger that much anymore.

The Plague was boring. The whole point of this one was to point out something about the fragility of our existence and how we react when faced with death and so on and so on. It's Camus. If you read The Stranger or The Fall or presumably any of his other works you know what he is about.

This is all existentialist doom and gloom type of stuff which maybe I'll read again when I'm feeling angsty and have a messy break up or something. I dunno.

I used to find Camus' frank writing style ummm....daring or unconventianal and maybe even elegant in it's sparseness. Now i just kind of ho-hum and watch the words (and page count) go by.

If you're feeling like humanity is hopeless Camus is good stuff. If you're not sure if we're all hopeless and doomed or if maybe there is some goodness left in humankind read Hesse instead. He's better. If you're convinced that everything will turn out peachy read, i don't know...Mitch Alborn or something.

[Eisworth]

A lot of The Plague can be read as a manual of "how to be an existentialist hero". It can also be read allegorically, with the eponymous plague representing the Nazis and those fighting the plague as the resistance in France. It can be read even more allegorically with "the plague" standing for the meaninglessness of life, and then noting how the heros fight this by their actions and choices. He managed to pack a lot into this book, even if it isn't riveting fiction.
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Todd Eisworth
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Ohio University

[galactic_dev]