Book Review: The Plague

The Plague by Albert Camus; translated by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage International, 1948. 320 pp)

Born in French Algeria, Albert Camus was a renowned author and philosopher. He attended the University of Algiers. Camus is best known for his novels, The Plague and The Stranger as well as his view of absurdism in philosophy. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957 and died in a car accident in 1960.

Stuart Gilbert was an English literary scholar and translator. He translated into English works from André Malraux, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Georges Simenon, Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Awaiting the Big One

It seems every couple of years, a potential pandemic arises. Whether swine or bird flu, society lives in fear of the next Spanish flu, a robust strain of influenza capable of wreaking havoc in the world. Perhaps this phobia emerges from the fear of the unknown. If we can’t measure and experiment it, how can we ever be prepared? Such an illness reminds us of the powerlessness of humanity. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, a small virus can destroy society.

Interestingly, the portrayal of pandemics exists throughout the media of artistic expression. Just recently, we encountered the theme in the blockbuster, Contagion.

While most certainly not the first in this genre (though it might be—more research is required and I am too lazy to do it), I found Albert Camus’ The Plague fascinating.

The Plague

Photo by José Goulão 

Chronicling the rise of a pandemic in the Algerian city of Oran in the early 1940s, The Plague follows Dr. Bernard Rieux and his fellow medical workers as they combat the bubonic plague.

Much like the devastating plague of the Middle Ages, residents begin the spiral downward when they notice the city’s rat population dwindling in dramatic fashion.

“Puffing a cigarette, Jean Tarrou was gazing down at the convulsions of a rat dying on the step in front of him. He looked up, and his gray eyes remained fixed on the doctor for some moments; then, after wishing him good day, he remarked that it was rather odd, the way all these rats were coming out of their holes to die” (13).

Soon, the strange rat deaths transfer to their human counterparts. What begins as a few cases emerging daily grows exponentially in the coming weeks. Very quickly, the plague overwhelms Rieux.

“And every evening mothers wailed thus, with a distraught abstraction, as their eyes fell on those fatal stigmata on limbs and bellies; every evening hands gripped Rieux’s arms, there was a rush of useless words, promises, and tears; every evening the nearing tocsin of the ambulance provoked scenes as vain as every form of grief. Rieux had nothing to look forward to but a long sequence of such scenes, renewed again and again” (90-91).

The grueling deaths from the plague create a miasmic atmosphere. Rieux and his motley assembly of volunteers traverse thequarintined city helping the sick. What follows is a life and death struggle between citizens and this faceless affliction.

Gritty Realism

For me, The Plague resembles Saramago’s Blindness and I wonder how much influence Camus provides for Saramago. The prose in The Plague displays a gritty realism reminding the reader of the ever-present danger lurking behind every breath, wheeze, and cough.

Camus vividly depicts this realism when describing the agony of infected Oran citizens. Recounting a young child, Camus writes:

“When for the third time the fiery wave broke on him, lifting him a little, the child curled himself up and shrank away to the edge of the bed, as if in terror of the flames advancing on him, licking his limbs. A moment later, after tossing his head wildly to and fro, he flung off the blanket. From between the inflamed eyelids big tears welled up and trickled down the sunken, leaden-hued cheeks. When the spasm had passed, utterly exhausted, tensing his thin legs and arms, on which, within forty-eight hours, the flesh had wasted to the bone, the child lay flat, racked on the tumbled bed, in a grotesque parody of crucifixion” (215).

Such prose is heartbreaking and horrifying. The level of detail strikes fear in the heart of men. What is keeping our modern society from facing a new strain inflicting damage such as this?

A Fight Against Terror and Its Relentless Onslaughts

Albert Camus

Truthfully, life will always be a fight against such unknown assailants. Camus poetically ponders,

“Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers” (308).

When such unknowns emerge, a robust resolve to heal is the only response humanity has. Epidemics come and go. Some exotic bacteria will wreak havoc someday. But humanity has a choice. We can either cower behind an inevitable deterministic attitude, or we can fight.

Camus’ The Plague exhibits the horrifying nature of disease. It also promotes the tenacity of humanity. If you are interested in gritty realism, check out The Plague.

Verdict: 3.5 out of 5
---
Posted by: Donovan Richards

Affiliate Links: Powell's Amazon Indie Bound

Book Review: Cain

Cain: A Novel by José Saramago; translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 176 pp)

José Saramago was a Nobel Prize-winning author from Portugal. He passed away at the age of 87 on June 18, 2010. Although Saramago did not receive widespread recognition until he was 60 years old, he has been highly prolific in the years since. Blindness, one of Saramago's most highly regarded books was made into a major motion picture in 2008. He is survived by his wife Pilar Del Rio and a daughter from a previous marriage.

Margaret Jull Costa translates Portuguese and Spanish fiction and poetry. For her work she has won the Portuguese Translation Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize.

The Old Testament Is Rated NC-17 

Have you ever thoroughly read the Old Testament? Have you spent time in the gory details? When fully diving into the stories, they can unsettle. Without holistically considering Scripture, God can seem like a vindictive deity perfectly willing to commit genocide for superfluous reasons. If we never focused on God’s attributes of grace, how would we conceive of the Christian deity? To a certain extent, José Saramago’s Cain answers this question.

The Lord of Forgetfulness 

Cain sacrilegiously details the narrative of the Old Testament. Saramago commences the story at the end of the creation narrative. The lord—note the lower case—completes creation but does not perceive it as good:

“When the lord, also known as god, realized that adam and eve, although perfect in every outward aspect, could not utter a word or make even the most primitive of sounds, he must have felt annoyed with himself, for there was no one else in the garden of eden whom he could blame for this grave oversight, after all, the other animals, who were, like the two humans, the product of his divine command, already had a voice of their own, be it a bellow, a roar, a croak, a chirp, a whistle or a cackle” (1).

Photo by Nick Thompson

Beginning the book with the passage above, Saramago sets the stage for the lord as a bumbling and far-from-perfect character. After the excommunication of adam and eve from the garden of eden, the lord recedes into the background as the young family births cain and abel.

The lord does not reappear until cain and abel have grown into their respective vocations. Seeking a deeper connection with their creator, the sons offer first fruits as a sacrifice.

“The smoke from the meat offered by abel rose straight up and vanished into infinite space, a sign that the lord accepted the sacrifice and was well pleased, but the smoke from cain’s vegetables, nurtured with just as much love, hardly rose up at all and dispersed when it was barely a few feet above the ground, which meant that the lord had rejected it out of hand” (23-24).

Clearly, cain internalizes this rejection and retaliates by murdering his brother. Recognizing this injustice, the lord accuses cain. But cain refuses to let the lord off the hook. To cain, the responsibility for abel’s murder falls solely at the feet of the lord. If the lord recognized the gracious offering cain provided, no harm would have occurred.

Cain the Wanderer 

Nevertheless, the lord inflicts cain with a peripatetic lifestyle. But, showing an element of what Christians would call grace and what cain would call a curse considering its effect on his life, the lord marks his forehead, thereby promising protection.

At this point, the plot unfolds rather bizarrely. Cursed to wander the earth, cain unsuccessfully attempts to establish himself in the land of nod, only to time travel to the major events of the Old Testament. Coincidentally, these major events make the lord seem like a cruel tyrant.

“His eyelids were just beginning to droop when he was startled into wakefulness by the voice of a young boy calling, Father, this was followed by a much older voice asking, What is it, isaac, We have the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering, and the father replied, The lord will provide a lamb as the burnt offering” (68).

Photo by Kuzeytac

Through these visitations, one must note Saramago only chose the most difficult passages in Scripture while glossing over the stories where the lord exhibits grace. Cain comprehends with great horror the difficult nature of a jealous and vindictive lord.

“I have learned one thing, What’s that, That our god, the creator of heaven and earth, is completely mad, Do you dare to call the lord god mad, Only a madman unaware of what he was doing would admit to being directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and then behave as if nothing had happened” (116).

A History of Misunderstandings

As the previous quotation indicates, the novel, Cain, is not for those unable to cope with an extremely unorthodox retelling of the biblical narrative. While the character cain acts as a protagonist, the lord represents the antagonist. But, Cain merely is not an elocution of atheism. Saramago carefully submits the notion of miscommunication as the core theme in the story.

“The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him” (78).

Scripture contains complicated narratives about which too many modern Christians gloss over. With Cain, Saramago speaks directly toward the problematic notions of God’s character found in these ancient texts. Truthfully, God kills countless people in the Pentateuch and Saramago considers these actions from a literal and humanistic level.

If you enjoy literary fiction and are willing to encounter an unorthodox and perhaps offensive retelling of the biblical narrative, check out Cain.

Verdict: 4 out of 5

Have you read other unorthodox retellings of Bible stories? How do such stories make you feel? Does the story need to be orthodox for you to enjoy it? Is there value in retelling Bible stories in sacrilegious ways?
Share your thoughts below.

---

Posted by: Donovan Richards

Alternative Takes: Tiny Library

Affiliate Links:

Powell's Indie Bound Amazon

Book Review: The Cave

The Cave by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2002. 320 pp)

José Saramago was a Nobel Prize winning author from Portugal, who passed away at the age of 87 on June 18, 2010. Although Saramago did not receive widespread recognition until he was 60 years old, he has been highly prolific in the years since. Blindness, one of Saramago's most highly regarded books was made into a major motion picture in 2008. He is survived by his wife Pilar Del Rio and a daughter from a previous marriage.

Margaret Jull Costa translates Portuguese and Spanish fiction and poetry. For her work she has won the Portuguese Translation Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize.

The Perfect Circle

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates expands his theory of forms through the famous allegory of the cave. For Plato and by extension, Socrates, objects existed in two realms: the spiritual and the physical. By definition, the physical realm comprised of imperfect objects; the spiritual realm, on the other hand, contained perfect representations of objects.

As an example, consider a drawn circle. No matter how hard one tries to compose this circle, it will never be perfect. Our hands refuse to remain steady; our pencils or pens meet the paper poorly. Nevertheless, we, by definition, know what a circle is. Each point in the circle is precisely the same distance away from the middle point even if we could never compose such an image in real life.

The Allegory of the Cave

Photo by Puriri deVry

Plato, however, penned the allegory of the cave in order to share the same principles. In this cave, shackled people stare at fire-lit images of real-life objects dancing on the cave wall while the real objects exist outside the cave. Put simply, Plato argues that our world is like this cave and our actions are no different than staring at an ancient moving picture.

Leaning heavily on this metaphor, José Saramago wrote The Cave with an attention to translating the theory of forms to modern life through the lens of work.

Set in an unnamed city, Cipriano Algor is a potter who lives with his daughter, Marta, and his son-in-law, Marçal Gacho in the city’s surrounding countryside. Cipriano molds earthenware in his rustic pottery and exclusively delivers his goods to the Center, a gigantic commercial/residential complex for which Marçal works as a security guard.

An Inquiry into the Value of Work

One day, upon delivering his goods, Cipriano learns that the Center no longer desires his products. Faced with unemployment, Cipriano and Marta devise a new product for the Center to buy: clay figurines. Having received a preliminary order, Cipriano encounters numerous difficulties with his work and his family as they cautiously consider a move to the Center apartments.

With Saramago’s typical meta-narrative style and dense sentence structures comprising multiple-page-long paragraphs, the author ponders the superficiality of overtly consumerist capitalism. With the Center functioning as the typical transnational corporation, and Cipriano as the mom-and-pop shop, The Cave acts as an exploration in the value of work and the dehumanizing elements of major corporations substituting human relationship with bottom-line metrics.

Saramago illustrates the dichotomy between small and big business well when he writes,

“The head of the buying department did not respond immediately, he must have been considering whether it was worth amusing himself further with this kind of cat-and-mouse game, but his position on the Center’s organization chart reminded him that the whole definition and maintenance of hierarchical configurations is based on their being scrupulously respected and never contravened or transgressed, and, of course, the inevitable result of being too free and easy with one’s inferiors or subalterns is to undermine respect and to encourage license, or, to put it more explicitly and unambiguously, it all ends in insubordination, indiscipline and anarchy” (111).

In contrast to this structured hierarchy exhibited by the head of the buying department at the Center lies Cipriano’s pottery. A two person operation at most, the potter labors directly with materials, creating something out of nothing. Despite the beauty in manual labor and the creation of artisan consumer goods, the world is passing Cipriano by.

Saramago writes,

“Cipriano Algor complains and complains, but he does not seem to understand that kneaded clay is no longer stored like this, that it will not be long before the basic ceramics industries of today turn into laboratories with employees in white coats taking notes and with immaculate robots doing all the work” (124).

Photo by Dani Sarda Lizaran

Rightly, Saramago observes the death of manual labor in the developed world. No matter the care one takes in hand making a product, the modern world dictates that the same product can be made cheaper somewhere else.

While some people possess gifts of the mind, others, sadly, carry gifts of the hand. Given contemporary culture, this second set of people is finding their work slowly drying up. For Cipriano, his only choice is to become dependent upon the salary of his son-in-law or to move in with Isaura Madruga, a widow Cipriano fancies.

The Beauty of Meta-Narrative

As with every Saramago novel I have read, I am floored by the author’s mastery of language and the use of meta-narrative within the storyline. For example, Saramago loves pausing to discuss strange occurrences in language.

Consider this example:

“Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life” (56).

With a sense of poetry and impeccable descriptive language, Saramago ponders the absurdity of clichés. In the span of a sentence – yes, a very long sentence – Saramago formulates the absurdity of a stock phrase before he uses it in his narrative.

While only one example, The Cave is littered with these meta-narrative illustrations.

Saramago and Plato on Work

Aesthetic comments aside, The Cave ponders work and what it means to be alive in the modern world. What is work? Is it sculpting with your hands or is it sitting at a desk? Saramago likens this comparison to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Without the capability of truly forming an object with the opportunity to sell it in the open market, are we really any different than the shackled prisoners whose only reality dances in shadows upon the cave walls? If this question interests you, if you find the idea about a literary novel waxing philosophically on work, or if you like Saramago’s particular aesthetic prose, I recommend that you read The Cave.

Verdict: 3.5 out of 5

---

Posted by: Donovan Richards

Affiliate Links:

Book Review: The History of the Siege of Lisbon

The History of the Siege of Lisbon: A Novel by José Saramago (San Diego: Harcourt & Brace, 1998. 314 pp)

José Saramago was a Nobel Prize winning author from Portugal. He passed away at the age of 87 on June 18, 2010. Although Saramago did not receive widespread recognition until he was 60 years old, he has been highly prolific in the years since. Blindness, one of Saramago's most highly regarded books was made into a major motion picture in 2008. He is survived by his wife Pilar Del Rio and a daughter from a previous marriage.

Before we begin, I must confess that José Saramago is one of my favorite authors. His creativity, social critiques, and pseudo-realism in works like Blindness, The Stone Raft, and All the Names leave spellbinding memories etched in my brain.  With Saramago’s recent passing, I felt it necessary to finally read his Nobel Prize winning book, The History of the Siege of Lisbon.

Characteristic of Saramago’s work, The History of the Siege of Lisbon contains long flowing sentences with little punctuation. Where a period would usually suffice, Saramago inserts a comma; where quotation marks typically reside, he deletes them. With these characteristics in mind, the book requires a close reading.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon follows a lonely proof-reader named Raimundo Silva through his secluded lifestyle within the remarkable metropolis of Lisbon. Raimundo’s only friends seem to be reference books on grammar and his only hobby is to correct the thoughts of others. One day while Raimundo edits a book detailing the history of the siege of Lisbon, he decides to create instead of edit. Where the book once reminded us that the crusaders came to the aid of the Portuguese in the war against the Moors, Raimundo’s newly revised edition  concludes that the crusaders most certainly did not heed the call to help their Portuguese brethren. A simple “no” not only alters the course of history, it also modifies his relationship with his publishing house. Ultimately, Raimundo’s talent is the only thing that keeps him from unemployment.

The turmoil generated by a proofreader’s decision to create instead of edit brings Raimundo some unlikely benefit: the publishing house hires a lovely woman named Maria Sara to proofread the proofreaders. As the narrative expands, Raimundo and Maria’s relationship slowly turns from professional to something slightly more romantic. Raimundo’s brazen attempt to alter a historical fact intrigues Maria and one day she encourages him to finish the history of the siege of Lisbon with the changed premise regarding the crusaders. What follows is a masterfully blended tale of both Raimundo and Maria’s relationship and the relationship of characters developed in the revised history book Raimundo writes at the request of Maria Sara.

“The two roses in the vase are standing in water from which they draw nourishment, it is true that they do not last long, but relatively speaking, neither do we” (285).  

The History of the Siege of Lisbon is ultimately a book about life, death, and the relationships that keep us going. Years pass on a clock and years pass on a face, but the more important part of life is the relationship you have with the people around you, the joy of having a second rose in the vase.

As mentioned before, The History of the Siege of Lisbon is a challenging read. José Saramago’s unique style coupled with a story told in two dimensions requires an astute eye. However, persistence pays off with this book as the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who is willing to work through the challenging syntax in order to see the narrative as a whole. However, if you are new to José Saramago, I urge you to start with a more popular work such as Blindness.