The Plague
Albert Camus · 1947
Rieux's quiet refusal to stop helping people, even when help seems absurd, is the most compelling portrait of secular moral heroism in French fiction. Camus published his allegorical account of bubonic plague in Oran, Algeria, in 1947. It surged back to bestseller lists in 2020 during COVID. The relevance was unsurprising.
The case against
Oran is an Algerian city, yet Camus populates it entirely with Frenchmen; the Arabs are simply not there, an absence that gets harder to unsee. Women fare little better: Rieux's wife exists offstage to die. The flat chronicle tone is the point, but two hundred pages of gray stoicism is a long walk, and the allegory asks the rats to carry a lot.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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