By Emily Dickinson.
Illustrated by Rex Schneider. Introduction by Richard B. Sewall. 1978, Stemmer House, Maryland.
20 February 2007
I’m going to be a father soon, so children’s books have been on my mind of late. This one’s illustrated almost entirely in color pencil and possibly pastel, and the goal is to make Emily Dickinson’s poetry more accessible to children. I think overall it works very well. In fact, I’m not embarrassed to admit that having everything drawn out for me helps a great deal; I don’t have the sort of brain that’s good at solving riddles, and many of Dickinson’s poems are just that. Maybe it’s cheating, but when I have an illustrator there to whisper unsubtly in my ear “It’s about a snake!” or “She’s describing a snowstorm,” it’s much easier for my mind to settle down and enjoy the poem line-by-line.
Schneider takes advantage of the fact that Dickinson never gave titles to her poems. Sometimes the last line of a poem will be withheld so you have to flip the page to see the resolution. (“It’s about a snake!”) Sometimes two short poems will share the same page. The overall effect is that the whole book is one big poem, a series of glances at the imaginative world of a bright and reflective woman you can’t help want to know better.
The introduction by Richard Sewall gives a good rundown on the both the rewards and punishments of reading poetry. It’s written in just the right tone for kids age 10-12, candid and not at all patronizing. And the glossary at the end gives great tailored descriptions of words kids might stumble over.
Schneider’s drawings of people come off a little stiff and the various elfin figures he uses to represent winds, frost and seasons have a little too much Disney in them for my taste, but the overall effect of seeing Emily Dickinson’s thoughts on nature rendered on the page is so refreshing and fun as to rinse the mind of all trifling concerns about petty details. This is a book to be thoroughly enjoyed.
Die Pest (The Plague)
by Albert Camus, 1947, translated to German by Guido G. Meister, published by Rowohlt, Hamburg.
20 February 2007; Up to page 27 of 182.
I haven’t come very far in this book. The copy I have is an old paperback with a spine reinforced by the publishers with heavy tape. I found the copy at C&M used books while coming back from a volunteer activity at a local soup kitchen. I’ve read two other books by Camus in German, so it’s becoming a tradition for me. Oddly, it’s easier for me to read Camus than it is to read almost any other author in German. It’s even easier to read it than it is for me to read a lot of prose in English. I think the reason is because Camus wasn’t trying to play any games with language. As a reader, I never feel like he’s trying to buy me off with any tricks or affectations, nor do I feel he’s struggling with any need to bolster up his own enthusiasm for what he’s writing. Everything’s cool and sharp like surgical equipment just before a surgery.
I’m not being wholly accurate. Der Fall, a later book, is more vague and lackluster. But Der Fremde (The Stranger) is told in a voice so remote and matter-of-fact that I read the whole book with a luxuriant case of the existential creeps. Der Fremde is the first-person account of a man who goes through life with almost total emotional and moral detachment. Camus makes no attempt to delve into the past and explore the cause of this constant calm. Rather, he simply lets the character pass through all the situations that we assume would trigger passions in anyone: love, injustice, murder and damnation. He takes part in all of them, takes note of all of them, and accepts them. Only at the end does the protagonist have a fit of rage when a minister attempts to bless him before his own execution.
Where Der Fremde deals with an individual, Die Pest brings us into a community, seaside town in Algiers sometime in the 1940s. The plot itself deals with signs of an emerging bubonic plague epidemic—first an infestation of rats, then a series of grotesque deaths, all described in a resigned and neutral tone that serves to amplify the horror of the matter. But though the tone is similar to Der Fremde, I think Camus has a different strategy here. We meet a number of characters, and each seems to have some sort of burden. The solitary Cottard attempts suicide. Dr. Rieux is worried about his wife, whose tuburculosis has forced her to go away to a sanitarium. Michel, the superintendent of Rieux’s building, is dismayed at how the rat infestation reflects on his self-image. The general impression is that everyone suffers in isolation. No one is capable of starting a relationship where compassion and healing could take place.
I know that many people have interpreted this novel as an allegory of fascism, so I suspect that as the story develops, we’ll see that brutality can break through the walls where compassion cannot.
28 February 2007; pp. 27-102
First off, a couple notes about the copy of the book I’m reading—it was printed in 1960 and right about page 94 there’s a cigarette ad. Not a glossy advertisement, just a page of the same paper as the text is written on with the slogan An guten Dingen finden alle Völker in gleicher Weise Geschmack. And there’s just a drawing of a cigarette. It’s hilarious and weird.
Also, in 1960 as today, many German novels will come with a page near the beginning with a condensed account of the author’s life as well as a summary of the novel’s plot. Whereas most American published books are highly marketed packages, with every blurb and graphic designed to increase the potential consumer’s willingness to open the old pocketbook, these descriptions of content (Inhalt) have more in common with the nutritional labels the FDA requires on foodstuffs. The Inhalt section of Die Pest notes that this book represents Albert Camus breaking away from the hard-line existential pessimism of his one-time mentor Jean Paul Sartre.
Reading the book, I understand this description. As the plague continues in the isolated city of Oran, a group of conscientious (and philosophical) citizens decides they must act independently to form a sanitation committee to “fight the plague.” In a prolonged subplot, the journalist Rambert, who seeks only to escape the city and be reunited with his lover, is won over to service in the sanitation group.
If you’re not reading the plague as a metaphor of fascism, and the sanitation group as a symbol of the resistance organizations in occupied and Vichy France, this whole section of debates about public health makes little sense, especially in a book where so little time is spent describing the actual physical and medical results of the plague, and so much is spent following the main characters around to various cafés and listening in on their conversations about the nonexistence of God.
I do have to say that though I’m happy Camus started finding some purpose in life, it didn’t stop him from making Die Pest a novel that’s sometimes too slack and lackadaisical. This is somewhat forgivable if you think of how long Europe basically shrugged off the emergence political radicalism in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy as just another way of doing things, and the way that the citizenry of fascist regimes were so “good” about swallowing their doubts and trying to just go on about their business. The best parts of Die Pest so far are the descriptions of mass psychology, the way Camus captures the canned heat of a community that can’t come to terms with its own impending doom.
But Camus hasn’t succeeded so far in creating an engaging cast of central characters. For the most part, the main characters Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert and Grand seem slight variations on the same personality; they’re all un-heroic, fundamentally disillusioned people who nonetheless choose to make sacrifices for a cause that’s humane yet hopeless. Their philosophical discussions seem much more like the inner dialogue of a single mind, rather than the dialogues of diverse people who have to challenge themselves to find common ground.
The only part of the book that’s a little embarrassing is the depiction of the clerk Grand’s attempts to be a writer of fiction. I guess we’re supposed to be amused when we see how the poor guy spends weeks anguishing over the choice of words for the first sentence of his novel, but it really seems like the sort of humor you’d expect to see on an episode of Family Ties or The Facts of Life than something that belongs in a philosophical novel.
I do expect the plot to pick up a little, and hope the characters gain a little bit of independence as the history of the plague unfolds.
7 March 2007; p. 102 to end.
At first it seemed odd to me that Camus spent so little time focusing on the actual effects the plague had on those suffering from it, almost as though admitting that the plague was just an excuse for him to depict the stresses put on a society by extraordinary forces such as war and repression. I should have known not to underestimate this writer. Rather than play up the horror of the situation, Camus’ plague-ridden city of Oran is under a quarantine law by which those diagnosed with the plague are immediately removed from their family members and loved ones. The sick are kept in provisional hospitals, often set up in schools, and the family members are kept under observation in a sports arena near the outskirts of town. Through most of the book, we observe the quiet, dreamy atmosphere of a town that lives in this state of weird divorce both from the outside world and from the disease that’s killing more and more people every day. Right at the heart of the narrative, we get an extremely concentrated look at the effects the plague has on a single boy. The detail is excruciating, from the young boy’s crabbed hands to his cries of sheer rage at the pain. By focusing on this one instance of crushing misery, Camus makes the book simple, believable and deadly serious, and made me feel that the main characters, almost all of whom are present at the boy’s bedside, really are driven to grappling with the thoughts about suffering, justice and the worth of life in dialogues that, in a lesser book, would seem abstract and pretentious.
One of the most interesting of these discussions is between the book’s central character, Dr. Rieux, and the Jesuit priest Paneloux. Witnessing the suffering and death of an innocent child, Paneloux is faced with fundamental challenges to his faith. I especially liked this character because he’s believable and complex, and represents a maturing perception of religion on Camus’ part. Whereas Der Fremde reads as a complex but ultimately childish and spiteful putdown of religion as a whole, in Die Pest Camus seems to recognize that sincere faith is too important to be simply brushed aside by even the most disillusioned existentialist. For one thing, the sacrifices that some religionists made in fighting fascism during the 1930s and 40s were often great and admirable; and on the other hand, religion has dealt for so long with the same issues that concern existentialists that, even if the two schools of thought are bound to come to different conclusions, it would be dishonest to deny that they share a concern with the same questions and they must speak of them in the same vocabulary.
Is the plague a metaphor for fascism? Kind of. But Camus is aware of the fickleness of the mind, aware that even among serious thinkers, fashions come and go and there will be a day when people fool themselves into thinking that the rise of militant totalitarianism was merely a thing of the past. Rather, Camus uses the plague as a metaphor for the phenomenon of suffering itself. He draws clear parallels between the conditions in Oran and those in Europe under fascism, but he also intentionally divorces the plague from politics by making it a force beyond human control. “Yes,” he seems to be saying, “The Nazis may have unleashed great suffering into the world, but it would be too good to them to credit them even with responsibility for the suffering they brought to the modern world: in truth, suffering and atrocity is always present, it is more true than any abstract idea of nation or creed.”
Camus entertains the idea that of all we experience in this world, suffering is the only thing that is true. But he also gives fair play to the possibility that suffering is rather only the gateway to truth, that truth can only be attained by those who head straight on into Hell and aren’t afraid. While Die Pest is not as enjoyable to read or even as well written as Der Fremde, the fact that Camus can find room in one story for two worldviews so powerful and contradictory makes this the better of the two books.
20 February 2007; Up to page 27 of 182.
I haven’t come very far in this book. The copy I have is an old paperback with a spine reinforced by the publishers with heavy tape. I found the copy at C&M used books while coming back from a volunteer activity at a local soup kitchen. I’ve read two other books by Camus in German, so it’s becoming a tradition for me. Oddly, it’s easier for me to read Camus than it is to read almost any other author in German. It’s even easier to read it than it is for me to read a lot of prose in English. I think the reason is because Camus wasn’t trying to play any games with language. As a reader, I never feel like he’s trying to buy me off with any tricks or affectations, nor do I feel he’s struggling with any need to bolster up his own enthusiasm for what he’s writing. Everything’s cool and sharp like surgical equipment just before a surgery.
I’m not being wholly accurate. Der Fall, a later book, is more vague and lackluster. But Der Fremde (The Stranger) is told in a voice so remote and matter-of-fact that I read the whole book with a luxuriant case of the existential creeps. Der Fremde is the first-person account of a man who goes through life with almost total emotional and moral detachment. Camus makes no attempt to delve into the past and explore the cause of this constant calm. Rather, he simply lets the character pass through all the situations that we assume would trigger passions in anyone: love, injustice, murder and damnation. He takes part in all of them, takes note of all of them, and accepts them. Only at the end does the protagonist have a fit of rage when a minister attempts to bless him before his own execution.
Where Der Fremde deals with an individual, Die Pest brings us into a community, seaside town in Algiers sometime in the 1940s. The plot itself deals with signs of an emerging bubonic plague epidemic—first an infestation of rats, then a series of grotesque deaths, all described in a resigned and neutral tone that serves to amplify the horror of the matter. But though the tone is similar to Der Fremde, I think Camus has a different strategy here. We meet a number of characters, and each seems to have some sort of burden. The solitary Cottard attempts suicide. Dr. Rieux is worried about his wife, whose tuburculosis has forced her to go away to a sanitarium. Michel, the superintendent of Rieux’s building, is dismayed at how the rat infestation reflects on his self-image. The general impression is that everyone suffers in isolation. No one is capable of starting a relationship where compassion and healing could take place.
I know that many people have interpreted this novel as an allegory of fascism, so I suspect that as the story develops, we’ll see that brutality can break through the walls where compassion cannot.
28 February 2007; pp. 27-102
First off, a couple notes about the copy of the book I’m reading—it was printed in 1960 and right about page 94 there’s a cigarette ad. Not a glossy advertisement, just a page of the same paper as the text is written on with the slogan An guten Dingen finden alle Völker in gleicher Weise Geschmack. And there’s just a drawing of a cigarette. It’s hilarious and weird.
Also, in 1960 as today, many German novels will come with a page near the beginning with a condensed account of the author’s life as well as a summary of the novel’s plot. Whereas most American published books are highly marketed packages, with every blurb and graphic designed to increase the potential consumer’s willingness to open the old pocketbook, these descriptions of content (Inhalt) have more in common with the nutritional labels the FDA requires on foodstuffs. The Inhalt section of Die Pest notes that this book represents Albert Camus breaking away from the hard-line existential pessimism of his one-time mentor Jean Paul Sartre.
Reading the book, I understand this description. As the plague continues in the isolated city of Oran, a group of conscientious (and philosophical) citizens decides they must act independently to form a sanitation committee to “fight the plague.” In a prolonged subplot, the journalist Rambert, who seeks only to escape the city and be reunited with his lover, is won over to service in the sanitation group.
If you’re not reading the plague as a metaphor of fascism, and the sanitation group as a symbol of the resistance organizations in occupied and Vichy France, this whole section of debates about public health makes little sense, especially in a book where so little time is spent describing the actual physical and medical results of the plague, and so much is spent following the main characters around to various cafés and listening in on their conversations about the nonexistence of God.
I do have to say that though I’m happy Camus started finding some purpose in life, it didn’t stop him from making Die Pest a novel that’s sometimes too slack and lackadaisical. This is somewhat forgivable if you think of how long Europe basically shrugged off the emergence political radicalism in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy as just another way of doing things, and the way that the citizenry of fascist regimes were so “good” about swallowing their doubts and trying to just go on about their business. The best parts of Die Pest so far are the descriptions of mass psychology, the way Camus captures the canned heat of a community that can’t come to terms with its own impending doom.
But Camus hasn’t succeeded so far in creating an engaging cast of central characters. For the most part, the main characters Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert and Grand seem slight variations on the same personality; they’re all un-heroic, fundamentally disillusioned people who nonetheless choose to make sacrifices for a cause that’s humane yet hopeless. Their philosophical discussions seem much more like the inner dialogue of a single mind, rather than the dialogues of diverse people who have to challenge themselves to find common ground.
The only part of the book that’s a little embarrassing is the depiction of the clerk Grand’s attempts to be a writer of fiction. I guess we’re supposed to be amused when we see how the poor guy spends weeks anguishing over the choice of words for the first sentence of his novel, but it really seems like the sort of humor you’d expect to see on an episode of Family Ties or The Facts of Life than something that belongs in a philosophical novel.
I do expect the plot to pick up a little, and hope the characters gain a little bit of independence as the history of the plague unfolds.
7 March 2007; p. 102 to end.
At first it seemed odd to me that Camus spent so little time focusing on the actual effects the plague had on those suffering from it, almost as though admitting that the plague was just an excuse for him to depict the stresses put on a society by extraordinary forces such as war and repression. I should have known not to underestimate this writer. Rather than play up the horror of the situation, Camus’ plague-ridden city of Oran is under a quarantine law by which those diagnosed with the plague are immediately removed from their family members and loved ones. The sick are kept in provisional hospitals, often set up in schools, and the family members are kept under observation in a sports arena near the outskirts of town. Through most of the book, we observe the quiet, dreamy atmosphere of a town that lives in this state of weird divorce both from the outside world and from the disease that’s killing more and more people every day. Right at the heart of the narrative, we get an extremely concentrated look at the effects the plague has on a single boy. The detail is excruciating, from the young boy’s crabbed hands to his cries of sheer rage at the pain. By focusing on this one instance of crushing misery, Camus makes the book simple, believable and deadly serious, and made me feel that the main characters, almost all of whom are present at the boy’s bedside, really are driven to grappling with the thoughts about suffering, justice and the worth of life in dialogues that, in a lesser book, would seem abstract and pretentious.
One of the most interesting of these discussions is between the book’s central character, Dr. Rieux, and the Jesuit priest Paneloux. Witnessing the suffering and death of an innocent child, Paneloux is faced with fundamental challenges to his faith. I especially liked this character because he’s believable and complex, and represents a maturing perception of religion on Camus’ part. Whereas Der Fremde reads as a complex but ultimately childish and spiteful putdown of religion as a whole, in Die Pest Camus seems to recognize that sincere faith is too important to be simply brushed aside by even the most disillusioned existentialist. For one thing, the sacrifices that some religionists made in fighting fascism during the 1930s and 40s were often great and admirable; and on the other hand, religion has dealt for so long with the same issues that concern existentialists that, even if the two schools of thought are bound to come to different conclusions, it would be dishonest to deny that they share a concern with the same questions and they must speak of them in the same vocabulary.
Is the plague a metaphor for fascism? Kind of. But Camus is aware of the fickleness of the mind, aware that even among serious thinkers, fashions come and go and there will be a day when people fool themselves into thinking that the rise of militant totalitarianism was merely a thing of the past. Rather, Camus uses the plague as a metaphor for the phenomenon of suffering itself. He draws clear parallels between the conditions in Oran and those in Europe under fascism, but he also intentionally divorces the plague from politics by making it a force beyond human control. “Yes,” he seems to be saying, “The Nazis may have unleashed great suffering into the world, but it would be too good to them to credit them even with responsibility for the suffering they brought to the modern world: in truth, suffering and atrocity is always present, it is more true than any abstract idea of nation or creed.”
Camus entertains the idea that of all we experience in this world, suffering is the only thing that is true. But he also gives fair play to the possibility that suffering is rather only the gateway to truth, that truth can only be attained by those who head straight on into Hell and aren’t afraid. While Die Pest is not as enjoyable to read or even as well written as Der Fremde, the fact that Camus can find room in one story for two worldviews so powerful and contradictory makes this the better of the two books.
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