The Rebel - Albert Camus

  

My thoughts about this book mirror my thoughts about The Myth of Sisyphus, but The Rebel actually gets a proper post on this blog because it's the book that got me a work iPad. 

Until a couple of years ago, I always had a book with me as I was waiting for students to see me in our open-plan workspace. I'd much rather spend 5 minutes reading a couple of pages than staring at a wall. Then one day my boss informed me that it wasn't acceptable, that if the School's director was to walk in and see me with a book she would have thought I was underworked (not strictly speaking untrue...) and that he would get me an iPad so I could do my e-mails in those lulls between meetings. Needless to say, that is the iPad on which I'm now reading a lot of ebooks...

As for The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus, I read them at a time in which I didn't have many other options handy. I read them because I felt that I had to, and because I had loved The Plague and The Outsider. Yet, these two less accessible books proved to be a slog for me. In short: instead of reading philosophical essays, I'm much better off reading their synopses on Wikipedia!

The Stranger – Albert Camus

I have already commented on my discovery of Camus. The Stranger was the first book of his that I read, and it came in the most obscene format: I bought in on Amazon without realizing that it was one of the print on demand books that they now produce – needless to say the edition wasn’t particularly nice, in particular because it was printed on A4 paper and at first sight felt like a children’s book.

Clearly, the book is quite far from being a children’s one. While I definitely liked it, I cannot really say that I loved it. The protagonist’s detachment from life – and from his crime – probably rubbed on me as I found myself reading without too much interest about his life in prison, his trial and, ultimately, his sentence.

Or maybe that was all Camus wanted the reader to feel? Probably so. The guy, after all, was a genius…

The Plague - Albert Camus

I didn’t dare reading Camus until I turned 28. I was afraid it would be too heavy, too grim, too deep (too French?). I was wrong.

One of those books (many, lately) that I couldn’t put down. One character more interesting than the other (my favourite being, clearly, Tarrou, with his fight against the Francoists in Spain and against the epidemic in Algeria). Without needing to analyze the book as a metaphor of the struggles of everyone’s lives, or of the evils of the 20^th century, this is simply one of the greatest stories ever told.

As I read it I kept on trying to portray myself as Tarrou, or as Dr Rieux. Like a little boy, I really wish I could “do the right thing” in the same way as they did in the novel (and, unlike in Spike Lee’s movie, here, it is quite clear what the right thing actually is)