2: The Plague - Albert Camus (1947; translated from French)

Well first of all, I'm pretty disheartened because after some blogspotting around I discovered that this lady appears to be doing exactly what I'm doing, only much better than me: http://abookaweek.blogspot.com/.

She actually finishes the books and everything. I only wish that I could promise you some kind of gratituous violence/nudity in order to compete. I'll do Chatterley next, I promise (wahey). However, I am finding that I'm becoming suspiciously more like an English student of late. I've taken up drinking tea in what I can only describe as a most kitsch and adorable manner, and am wearing cardigans like there's some kind of sheep famine despite it being the height of summer. It's all very out of character, but I gather that these are amongst the most vital elements of being a true arts student, so my literary endeavours are getting me somewhere at least. Anyway, it's been a bloody lovely sunny week, so I thought I'd go for something light and airy about a town in the grip of a bubonic plague metaphorising the German occupation of France in World War Two. I hope you like it.

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Page reached: 202/252 properly, 203-252/252 skimmingly.

Effort rating: 3/10. Easy as, although with slight Wikipedia-ing needed once you start getting a whiff of the whole Nazi metaphor.

Overall enjoyment rating: 7/10. Good, but a bit dry in places. I suspect it would have slipped down that bit easier if I knew French well enough to read the original.

The blurb:
'A carefully wrought metaphysical novel the machinery of which can be compared to a Sophoclean tragedy. The plague in question afflicted Oran in the 1940's; and on one plane the book is a straightforward narrative. Into it, however, can be read all Camus' native anxieties, centred on the idea of plague as a symbol.'

I don't know what a Sophoclean tragedy is either.

Summary:

So there's this guy Rieux, who's a doctor in Oran (Algeria. I googled). His wife is in a sanitorium somewhere, but aside from that everything's going fairly swimmingly. Then one day he starts to notice that rats keep on running around spewing blood and dying everywhere (I'm not being vulgar, the descriptions are pretty bloody graphic). Then it all gets a bit bubonic, and before you know it, boom. Plague. The concierge of Rieux's apartment building is the first human death. Oh, and it's proper medieval-style plague, buboes and all. Yum. Rieux and his doctor buddy Castel have a poke around and get pretty good idea of what's going on. But the authorities don't believe them, and in a basically arse around making posters primary-school-Geography style whilst the human death toll keeps rising. When it gets to 30 a day they finally accept it and the gates of Oran are closed completely to prevent the disease spreading, trapping everyone in.

As you might expect, being completely isolated from the outside world whilst simultaneously being in constant fear for your own life isn't all fun and games. We're introduced to Rambert, a journalist in the town on business who is now separated from the love of his life in Paris and who makes it his mission to escape, despite this being not only expensive but really fucking difficult (I like to think of him as the Hugh Grant type character). The vicar, Paneloux, gets predictably pious and does a lot of shouting about the plague being sent from God to punish the citizens of Oran. Many turn to religion unquestioningly; I think this is where the metaphor starts seeping in. There's a reformed criminal, Cotter, who has just attempted suicide because he fears execution, but who is pretty much laughing in the new plague-ville because everyone else is bricking it as much as him death-wise. He also gets to become a Del-boy esque wheeler dealer, buying and selling commodities that aren't readily available in Oran. Oh, and Castel begins work on a nifty little anti-plague serum around this point. Treating patients along with Rieux are Tarrou, a vacationer and diary-keeper, and Grand, a civil-service bureaucrat who is simultaneously counting death tolls and, for a reason that is never quite explained, writing a shit novel about some woman with a sorrel horse. Sorry, Camus, your attempts at depth of character just piss me off and confuse me.

The plague gets worse and worse over a period of months. Rambert starts hanging around with some shady crims and bribing them to let him escape, but after a guilt trip from Tarrou, who is also separated from his normal life elsewhere, he comes over all heroic and decides he wants to help Rieux form a super medical posse and kick some bubonic arse. From hereon in it all gets a bit existentialist; the citizens start looting and burning with wild abandon, the authorities impose martial law and curfews, and everyone starts to 'waste away emotionally as well as physically' (oh Wiki, you're so fucking deep...hold me?). Rieux has to man up in a big way where plague victims are concerned and becomes a psychologist's wet dream, repressing his emotions and missing his wife all over the shop. Cottard is about the only person still living it large at this stage, and I imagine him to have now procured some kind of nifty afghan coat/purple bell bottoms ensemble, despite it being 1947. As the death toll reaches hundreds per day, Castel's anti-plague remedy is finally ready. However, it fails to save the life of a young boy, causing him a lot of suffering in the process. Cue despondency and despair in Team Medic. Paneloux dies, but not of the plague; this is signficant, I think, because he was pretty into not giving in to the plague (for 'plague' read 'Nazis'), so is dying an honest death.

A nice little illustration, although one in which I feel rat size may have been greatly exaggerated.

Next, Tarrou and Rieux visit a quarantine isolation camp (concentration camp, see what he did there? Hmm?) and it all gets a bit generally horrific. There's a weird, highly incongruous and oddly homoerotic bit where they go swimming in the sea together and apparently become BFF's, telling each other all of their secrets. Sadly none of these are relevant to the plot, or even juicy. Character development fail #2, Camus. Grand (remember him?) then catches the plague. But in a dramatic reversal of fortune he doesn't die, and this marks a more general change of fortune pestilence-wise. Things gradually start to improve, and the re-opening of the town gates is planned. However, the ending is in no way the sunshine, lollipops and rainbows affair you may well expect from a post-war existentialist novel. Before the story's out Camus slips in cheeky last-minute deaths from both Tarrou and Rieux's wife, and Rambert's reunion with his lover turns out all fraught because he thinks his obsession with escaping took over from his actual feelings. Jesus Rambert, this is one situation in which you're pretty much guaranteed to get laid. Stop being so bloody emo. Oh, and Cottard goes on a celebratory end-of-plague shooting spree and gets himself arrested. Which is nice. And it's revealed that Rieux was secretly the narrator all along, which means he referred to himself in the third person with all the adeptness of a modern-day rap artist. Sort of like the reveal at the end of a murder mystery, only totally shit because I just kind of assumed he was the narrator all along anyway. Top marks for making me feel clever though.

Verdict:

Yeah, this book wasn't half bad. It sort of felt like you were in a history museum, only instead of trying to make history accessible through fun they'd used a bubonic plague metaphor, which is essentially just more history. But I don't mind a cheeky bit of history once in a while, so it was fine. The metaphor aspect was interesting, but I think you could probably be forgiven for completely missing that subtext if you hadn't already had the idea put in your head by the blurb. Or perhaps I just have little to no knowledge of the various Nazi occupations. Yeah, it's probably that. The Plague reminded me of Kafka, which is always a treat, but this may have been due to the odd sense of distance you get from a translation. The one big problem I found with the novel was in the language - it often felt like I was missing a trick style-wise and I'd quite like for someone who, unlike me, has been arsed to learn French to an adequate standard, to read it and let me know if the writing is any better.

I didn't really love any of the characters which was quite disappointing - I wanted to give Rambert a big shmush at the beginning, but then he got all idealistic which was bizarrely a turn-off. Perhaps because his idealism entailed an awful lot of buboe-lancing. An awful lot. Not that being a bit in love with a character is a prerequisite to enjoying a novel, but I'm just saying it helps. Case in point being film adaptations (yeah, I'm still hankering after a good one of those at this stage). They were all sort of generic wartime middle-aged men, which kind of brought to mind those black-and-white war films they put on TV on Saturday afternoons and Boxing Day. It's a boy's book, I think, which is ok - better a boy's book than Jane Austen, even if it does mean getting down to the nitty gritty of rat deaths and buboes. And the slightly apocalyptic side to the plot would probably make it into quite a good ridiculously budgeted film of the possible-collapse-of-society genre, starring Tom Cruise as an ageing yet hip Dad. Oh God, I badly need to stop comparing books to films. But films are generally good, which means this book must have been good. It was good. I didn't mind reading it at all. Cheers, Camus.

Best quote:
A big dollop of cute courtesy of early-novel Rambert:

'This was, indeed, the hour when he could feel surest she was wholly his. Till four in the morning one is seldom doing anything and at that hour, even if the night has been a night of betrayal, one is asleep. Yes, everyone sleeps at that hour, and this is reassuring, since the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one, or, failing that, to be able to plunge the loved one, when a time of absence intervenes, into a dreamless sleep timed to last unbroken until the day they meet again'
(Part Two, Chapter Five)

Read it if: Pestilence is your idea of a good time, or if you like your Franco-German history wrapped around you in a big cosy duvet of plague metaphor.

Better than TV?: Well, I certainly looked cooler reading a battered copy of a French book than I would have done watching a war doc on the History Channel.

Next Week: I'm feeling frisky. Lady Chatterley, here we come.

1: Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (1891)

Page reached: 105/449

Effort rating: 8/10

Overall enjoyment rating: 5/10 (but at least 2 of those are for the way in which this book relates so ridiculously specifically to a current in-joke of mine, so possibly more like 3)

The blurb:
'This age-old tale of the maid who goes to the greenwood and returns a maiden no more becomes in Hardy's hands an indictment of all the crimes and hypocrisies of nineteenth-century England....Hardy was never more masterly than here in evoking a vanished rural way of life; and even this most tragic of his books is lightened by his delightful and clear-eyed humour."

Summary: An undeniably village-y yet irritatingly charming girl (Tess) finds out her family are related to the aristocracy in some obscure way. They send her off to stay with their newfound relations (the D'Urbervilles) under the pretence of a) getting money for a new horse to replace the one she accidentally killed and b) looking after a blind old lady's chickens. However, being a stereotypical nineteenth-century novel family, they secretly hope that she'll be married off there and become a lady. So she goes, and sure enough she comes across an annoying yet hot cousin, Alec, who pretty much just tries to get a cheeky bit of tonsil hockey with her all the time (this often occurs whilst riding a horse, which judging by the amount of almost-deaths seems to be the period equivalent of talking on a mobile phone whilst driving). He also saves her from un-maiden-friendly situations quite a bit, so he's semi-redeemed for a while. And semi-something else actually, it would appear, for the first ten or so chapters of the novel. [This is how far I got, by the way, the rest is courtesy of Wikipedia]. So they end up in the woods alone together, and he rapes/seduces her - apparently this is ambiguous. They then have a 'confused dalliance' (thankyou Wiki, this is a phrase that will come in so very useful in describing my own life), but Tess has a moment of realisation regarding Alec's abject tosserdom and runs back home to her family. Only she's pregnant. In an action that puts the current trend for ridiculous celebrity child names into perspective, she names it 'Sorrow'. Living up to said name, Sorrow then dies.

Tess gets a job as a milkmaid in another village, and runs into Angel, this bloke she thought was hot and exchanged a steamy glance with in the beginning of the story. Clearly Tess doesn't mess about where these things are concerned, and they fall in love. Angel's Dad is a Reverend (still doesn't quite excuse the name though, does it?) in the habit of preaching to people, and is a bit pissed at the fact that he couldn't tame Alec D'Urberville, who basically has the reputation of some kind of nineteenth-century lad. Angel asks Tess to marry him, and she agrees, but she's worried because she's no longer a virgin. She gets her knickers in a typically hyperbolic novel-heroine twist over this, but when he confesses to her on their wedding night that he once had a cheeky little liaison with a woman in London (way to kill the mood, Angel), she finally admits what happened between her and Alec. Angel isn't really down with that, and runs off to Brazil.

Tess is pretty depressed, in what I can only assume to be a long and very irritating kind of a way. And then one day Alec rears his ugly possible-rapist head again. Only Angel's Dad has finally worked his magic, and he has now converted to Christianity. He decides that he wants to marry her, but obviously she's still married to Angel. Anyway, this is all dissolved when she has to go back home to care for her sick parents. Her father dies, and her family become homeless. In line with his newfound bible basher-dom, Alec offers to put them up, but Tess isn't really feeling the mysterious did he/didn't he rape me charm, and she declines. For some reason, the family then move in to a church.

A while later, Angel swings back into town feeling a bit guilty about ditching Tess, and he goes to her Mum to try and find her. But by this time Tess is living it large in a hotel somewhere. How? Why? What? That's right, Tess has become Alec's mistress. Angel finds her, and she basically tells him to do one. She then goes a bit off the rails, and blames Alec for losing Angel. She decides it's probably best for everyone if she just stabs him. Deed done, she runs back to Angel, and they wander aimlessly around fields for a few days generally being in love and having quite a good time of it. Then she gets caught and executed. Gutted.

Tess being annoyingly wistful in the BBC adaptation

Verdict: A bit like Austen, if Austen had had major Daddy issues. A fairly abysmal performance in terms of pages, but I didn't hate this novel, especially not plot-wise. I actually wish I'd read further, because I really expected her to end up with Alec. Obviously she did end up with him, but I mean in a conventional way, less of the homicide. I do think it's a bit too slow-moving; if Hardy would have jumped on the peril train about 10 pages earlier I probably would have hung in there. From the first 100 pages (and that is a quarter of the book after all) you could definitely be forgiven for thinking it was a standard period romance. I can't help but feel that my giving up on poor Tess so quickly is some kind of symptom of the internet generation; wanting quick fixes and cheap thrills and all that, but it's likely that I've just been spending too much time around the middle-aged. Hardy does take the piss with his descriptions though. I'd been warned about this by a friend, but carried on regardless like the complete and utter renegade that I am. Let's just say that I'm not quite convinced that I recieved the 'delightful and clear-eyed humour' the blurb promised me. Perhaps it got lost in the post. And by the post I mean circa 1910. But I suppose I can't really blame Hardy for the fact that I wasn't born in the nineteenth century, so maybe I'll let that one slide.

I was pleased to discover that Tess kicked arse in the end, because her maidenhood was really pretty sickening at the beginning. I mean, the girl went from being on the brink of suicide after accidentally killing a horse to doing away with her lover and casually strolling off with her estranged husband for what was essentially a dirty weekend of frolicking in a meadow. Speaking of meadows, I may also have been soured slightly by the overwhelming rurality of the novel - the country, as you may know, is not my friend. I did pick up on some hints of a darker undertone, but I was convinced that this was a respectable Victorian affair and that I was merely being vulgar. It's comforting to know that Hardy was of just as filthy a mind, although I'm not sure he'd be considering a pun surrounding his name at this point as I ashamedly am. I very much like the sound of this book's ending, and at some point I will have another stab at it (hello, plot-related pun), but it isn't easy to get through stylistically. Perhaps, I fear, this is just my literary immune system kicking in and rejecting the first alien antibody I try and force into my brain. By which I of course mean something which can't be bought at a train station and doesn't come with a free Benefit eye pencil.

Best quote:
'He asked her if she liked strawberries.
"Yes" said Tess, "when they come"
"They are already here." D'Urberville began gathering specimens of the fruit for her, handing them back to her as he stooped; and, presently, selecting a specially fine product of the 'British Queen' variety, he stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth.
"No - no!" she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand and her lips. "I would rather take it in my own hand."
"Nonsense!" he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips and took it in'
(Chapter 5)

If that isn't evidence of repressed Victorian sexuality, I don't know what is. Brings to mind Rossetti's Goblin Market especially.
I feel I should also commend the author on his sporadic use of the word 'banteringly'.

Read it if: You're big on loss of maidenhood, esp. with subsequent peril.

Better than TV?: Possibly, once you got to the good bit. Actually, I'd quite like to see a film adaptation of this book - is that cheating? I feel like a three-hour time limit would be good for Hardy; it might force him to cut the crap.
Oh, and Google tells me there is one. Excellent. So, end of the first week and I'm considering a film adaptation. Not quite the fits of literary passion I'd hoped for, but surely a step in the right direction...

NEXT WEEK: It's a surprise. Which means the order is out the window and I'll be reading whichever book I can get my hands on without paying for it.

The plan.

The book trade is capitalising on obligation. How many books are there that you're told you should read, that you simply must drag your eyes over before you die, that are 'classics' which will improve your life in some abstract and ethereal way? And how many books are bought each year, only to be leafed through for a couple of pages and then relegated to a dusty shelf once the reader realises that there's a film adaptation with Colin Firth?

My name is Helen Crane, I am a 21-year-old English student, and I hate reading. I really do. What was once a childhood pleasure, then an invaluable tool in my attempt to be quirky and dark in my teenage years, and finally the foundation of my University career is now nothing but an irritating fact of life; a neccessity. As with so many literature students before me, I have gone into novelistic overkill and ended up in a situation where even a takeaway menu is a bit more syntactically complex than I'm really comfortable with. However, I don't think it has to be this way, and I have come up with a plan to get my interest in literature back.

I've decided to have one final fling with literature. So I'm going to read. A lot. I'm going to read every single book I've ever felt like I ought to read, every book that I've been told is a 'classic', every book that I've heard being talked about and wished that I could comment on. I'm going to find out why anyone bothers to read through 560, 000 words of War and Peace, and why Lady Chatterley is always met with a look of prudish disdain. And then I'm going to write about them, and why they deserve to be applauded or why they don't, and try and make some kind of distinction between which books are actually worth reading and which are just classics for classic's sake. And I think that, even if I don't love books again by the end of this, I can at least say that I gave them one hell of a bloody chance.

I've done the obligatory run-through of the classics, so there will be no Jane Eyre, or Animal Farm, or To Kill A Mockingbird. What I'm really interested in is the books which everyone seems to talk about, which have gained some kind of cult status or intellectual capital, but which I suspect very few people have actually done the old cover-to-cover with. Quite a few of these are books which I have bought with such honourable intentions only to dump them unceremoniously when the going got tough. So here is my list. 23 books, which I'm going to read in 20 weeks. A book a week is what English courses generally say you have to read, and I have never done it, not ever. But I have a very long summer to contend with. I'm giving myself the 3 extra books so that I get 3 opportunities to swap out one text for another in cases where it is particularly unbearable, or an extra three weeks at the end if I really do become that enamoured with the written word. I hereby promise to read at least 100 pages of each, and to give a full justification if I decide to give up at any point. I haven't gone by any official list, these are just books which a) I have heard of through reputation b) Are considered to have some kind of inherent cultural value, and c) I haven't read before.

1. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
2. The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
3. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
4. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
5. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
6. Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
7. Post Office - Charles Bukowski
8. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
9. The Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
10. Ulysses - James Joyce
11. The Plague - Albert Camus
12. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H Lawrence
13. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
14. Middlemarch - George Eliot
15. 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
17. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
18. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
19. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
20. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
21. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
22. Howard's End - E.M Forster
23. Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell


Why am I doing this to myself, you might ask. Well, it's a challenge, primarily, and I'm the type of sadistic person who seems to enjoy setting themself ridiculous and barely achievable tasks. I think I'd also enjoy being able to sound like a bit of a tosser in everyday conversation, and, if spending the last two years around English students has taught me anything, it's that reading books most certainly equips you with the raw material necessary for this.

Really though, I suppose I want to find out why we feel we should read these books; are they good? Why are they good? Why is doing this better than watching TV? At best, this will be a life-affirming crusade through the very cream of the English literary crop, and one which I will leave immeasurably more eloquent and worldly-wise than when I began. And at worst? I'll do five pages of Middlemarch and need a month in front of America's Next Top Model to recover.