Author: Albert Camus
Translator: Jin-hee Song
Publisher: Hyewon
504 pages
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| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
The Plague:
The Nobel prize-winning Albert Camus, who died in 1960, could not have known
how grimly current his existentialist novel of epidemic and death would remain.
Set in Algeria, in northern Africa, The Plague is a powerful study of human life
and its meaning in the face of a deadly virus that sweeps dispassionately
through the city, taking a vast percentage of the population with it.
The Stranger:
The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th
century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus's
compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has
earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature
courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time.
Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a
purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the
Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The
remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period
philosophy.
The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of
aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and,
somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and
eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the
arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character.
The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that
Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then
attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning
facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and
inevitable.
Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical,
disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says
of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't
mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such
observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's
undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his
confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling
as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson
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