![]() ![]() Sick rats are the first sign that something is wrong. ![]() The titular outbreak in La peste takes place in an “ordinary" city. The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien called it “a sermon of hope.” It’s worth revisiting that hopefulness – the spirit that prompts Camus’s narrator to declare, famously, that plagues remind us “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” In La peste, his canonical treatment of a fictional bubonic plague outbreak in the Algerian city of Oran, the Nobel laureate trained a piercing eye on life under quarantine, with all its strangeness and misery.īut the novel also takes seriously the lessons these trying moments can teach – treats them, even, as a kind of redemption. Perhaps no writer has made better use of this material than Albert Camus. ![]() Ten books that offer lessons from past pandemics ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |