Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people would notice if they were not always thinking about themselves…. When war breaks out people say: ‘It won’t last, it’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn’t prevent it from lasting. There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared…. Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us. Yet his message is not unambiguously hopeful: pestilences are always lurking, lying in wait for the complacent. He depicts people rising to the challenge as a matter of course to show us that there is more to admire in our neighbors than to despise. Is The Plague a hopeful novel?Ĭamus melded his research and his own life experiences-transformed but still authentic-to give us the story of a city ravaged by disease in which everyone must choose a side: that of the pestilence or that of its victims. But maybe people are reading for reassurance. Reading epidemic fiction seems like a short, straight path to hypochondria. Personally, I’d rather read to take my mind off the virus-something with dragons, perhaps. It makes sense to me that people are staying home and reading more, but I don’t quite understand why people are devouring novels about epidemics. Many thousands of copies of this book have sold because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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