In 2020, 60 years after Albert Camus’s fatal car crash, The Plague, widely regarded as the greatest novel of postwar Europe, was again jumping off the shelves. The world was reading The Plague, and so was I. Like Camus’s fictionalized population of Oran, we were in lockdown, under siege. It was (and still is) a dark time. We were reading for light, however dim. We were reading, as C. S. Lewis once put it, to know we were not alone.
It makes sense that—plague-ridden and isolated—we turned to a book written in exile, encircled by pestilence. In the autumn of 1942, la peste brune, the Nazi brown plague, was surging across Europe and North Africa. At 29, Camus found himself trapped—like a rat, as he put it—when the German Wehrmacht invaded and occupied France’s so-called Free Zone.
