Albert Camus novel The Plague leads surge of pestilence fiction

A plague is spreading. People are dying. Everyone is ordered to quarantine at home as the local doctor works around the clock to save victims. There are acts of heroism and acts of shame; there are those who think only of themselves, and those who are engaged for the greater good. The human condition is absurd and precarious.

That is the situation in La Peste (The Plague), Albert Camus’s classic novel published in 1947, which is now attracting new generations of readers.

Camus’s daughter Catherine was 14 when she read La Peste, two months before her father died in a car accident. “The message of La Peste rings true today as it did back then, as it will in the future,” she told the Guardian. “I’m glad to learn people are reading it again. If there’s a passage in the book that speaks to readers, that gives them hope, this is what is important.”

Camus, 74, was speaking from her home at Lourmarin in the Lubéron, where she has lived for 30 years. The house, bought by her father from the money he made on being awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1957, is in rue Albert-Camus, a stone’s throw from the cemetery where the writer is buried.

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Albert Camus, who was born in Algeria, where La Peste is set, and died in 1960, aged 46, while being driven to his Provençal home by his publisher, Michel Gallimard. The car, a powerful Facel-Vega, veered off the road and hit two trees. Camus was killed instantly.

The cause of the accident, on a long stretch of straight, wide road, remains a mystery and there have been numerous theories. In his book The Death of Camus, the Italian author and academic Giovanni Catelli suggests the author may have been killed by the KGB after expressing his opposition to the Soviet regime.

Catherine and her twin brother, Jean, whom their father fondly nicknamed “Plague” and “Cholera”, were not directly told of his death and were kept away from the funeral.

For 40 years, Catherine Camus has managed her father’s literary legacy, controlling publication rights, publishing his letters and keeping the flame of her adored “Papa” alight while remaining in the shadows herself because, she said, “I prefer it there”.

“Perhaps with the lockdown we will have some time to reflect about what is real, what is important, and become more human,” she said.

“In 1946, when Papa wrote the book, wealth was measured by different standards to today, when people are simply chasing after gold and human beings are regarded as free market goods to be bought and sold. We jump from one thing to another. Everyone thinks they are right and forgets what life is about, that there are doubts.”

The British publisher of The Plague, Penguin Classics, says it is struggling to keep up with orders. “We’ve gone from shipping quantities in the low hundreds every month to the mid-thousands,” said Isabel Blake, the senior publicity manager.

In February last year, 226 copies of The Plague were sold in the UK. Last month the figure was 371. By last week, three weeks into the month, 2,156 copies had been sold in March, including 1,504 in one week alone.

“This is mostly through independent bookstores as Amazon is out of stock at the moment,” Blake said. “We’ve reprinted twice so far this year.”

La Peste begins one spring day when Bernard Rieux, a doctor from the Algerian city of Oran, finds a dead rat on his doorstep. Suddenly he sees rats, dead and alive, everywhere. When local people begin dying of the plague, the authorities order everyone to stay home.

Through his characters, Camus examines how people respond as individuals – and as part of a collective – to suffering and death. Whether it is a solitary experience or a show of social solidarity, nobody is indifferent.

The novel is set in 1940 but is loosely based on a cholera epidemic in 1849, after the French colonisation of Algeria.

Albert Camus said the novel could be read on several levels and was also an allegory of the French resistance to the pestilence of Nazism and the German occupation during the second world war.

“The inhabitants, finally freed, would never forget the difficult period that made them face the absurdness of their existence and the precariousness of the human condition,” he wrote. “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves,”

Catherine Camus said that from the many letters she receives about her father’s work, she had concluded that the enduring fascination with them was because “the man is in the books … he asked the same questions everyone asks and addressed the same suffering and pain and concerns everyone has”.

She believes the message of La Peste is that we are responsible for our actions. “We are not responsible for coronavirus but we can be responsible in the way we respond to it,” she said.

“Papa tried to speak for those who had no words of their own. He was physically determined to challenge lies; he believed that when you are a writer you cannot lie.

“It is wonderful that a new generation is discovering Camus, and I hope that in the silence of the confinement his words will have an echo.”

Catherine Camus said people had been calling her to say she must be happy to be receiving the extra money, confirming her dismal view that we all have become money-obsessed “robots”.

“Of course the money is helpful, but it’s not what is the most important. Papa doesn’t need help or promotion to sell his books, his work speaks for itself. He wrote what he had to say and he did it at the highest level,” she said.