States of Plague

"Albert Camus's novel The Plague will go down in literary history as one of the most talked about books of the Covid-19 crisis. Originally intended as an allegory of World War II, this story of an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic has been a staple of literature classes since 1947. Generations of students have learned that Camus was "really" writing about his experience of occupied Paris. In 2020, that reading tradition was transformed. The epidemic brought the novel close to readers who began to read it as a book about their own lives-a book to help them get through a global health crisis. Alice Kaplan, who teaches Camus at Yale, and Laura Marris, translator of a new edition of The Plague, wondered how Camus could know so much about what we were living through in mid-2020. His novel has it all: the official denials in the face of mounting deaths, the end of travel, the separation from one another during quarantine, the numbing grief. They wrote States of Plague in response-as a guide to these moments where the written and the real collide. For many people, The Plague feels personal now. And through this lens, certain features became vital: Camus's sensitivity toward illness, his experience of a contagious disease, the cost of separation in his own life, and the psychology and politics of the city in quarantine. Because they come to the book from different perspectives, Kaplan and Marris alternate their voices so that their chapters offer two complementary ways of looking at Camus. 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. Kaplan herself is struggling with a case if Covid as the book opens; as it closes, Marris receives her first vaccine shot. In between, they find, aspects of Camus's novel that once seemed merely literary spoke directly to their own fear and grief. They uncover for us the mysterious way a great writer can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on our possible futures"--