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La Peste
Albert Camus
Paris, 1947
 
First edition, "service de presse" review copy. Original printed wrappers in parchment cover. Areas of slight darkening to spine, moderate split at front cover joint and front endpaper, small scattered spots of rubbing on cover, tiny chipping around extremities. Withal, a sound, nice Near Fine copy of a very fragile book. Housed in custom red buckram slipcase.
 
Presentation copy by Camus on half title – "à Georgette Le Corre qui a coupé la [La Peste] et à la Peste avec la sympathie Albert Camus” - “To Georgette Le Corre Who cut the [The Plague] and the Plague With sympathy Albert Camus”
 
We have not been able to identify Ms. Le Corre. We have tried voraciously – going so far as to contact the assistant to Camus’ daughter, and they could not find a shred of information in their archives. However, the evidence suggests that she had a significant impact on his life.
 
Camus appears to be using wordplay with "coupe" and "la Peste.” He writes "qui a coupe (La Peste title print)" AND "et la Peste.” With "coupe" having various uses(to literally cut, slang for editing, or to reduce), this person could have helped him edit the book/formulate the story in some manner and also have had a hand in a real life "plague.” Perhaps this person had a medical background(there were small outbreaks in Olan during Camus’s life), or if he is referring to the plague as the Nazis(general agreement amongst scholars is that they are the pestilence described in the book) she could have been involved in anti-occupation actions. The fact that Camus purposefully wrote "and the Plague" again shows a pun usage for "cutting" and "plague."
 
‘Of all Camus’ novels, none described man’s confrontation – and cohabitation – with death so vividly and on such an epic scale as La Peste, translated as The Plague. Most of us read The Plague as teenagers, and we should all read it again. And again: for not only are all humankind’s responses to death represented in it, but now – with the advent of Ebola – the book works on the literal as well as metaphorical level. Camus’ story is that of a group of men, defined by their gathering around and against the plague. In it we encounter the courage, fear and calculation that we read or hear in every story about West Africa’s efforts to curtail and confront Ebola; through its narrator, Dr. Rieux, we can identity with the hundreds of Cuban doctors who went immediately to the plague’s Ground Zero, and those such as the Scottish nurse currently fighting for her life at the Royal Free Hospital in London. I think Camus intended such a literal – as well as allegorical - reading.
 
It is generally agreed that the pestilence he describes signifies the Third Reich. Writing in 1947, as the world whooped victory and “Never Again”, Camus insisted that the next plague “would rouse up its rats again” for “the bane and enlightenment of men.” But Camus was also aware of the great cholera epidemic in Oran, Algeria – where the novel is set – in 1849, and of others in his native district of Mondovi in the Algerian interior. But there is another reason we should all re-read La Peste(preferably in French or the English translation by Stuart Gilbert, a work of literature in itself). Like every good metaphorical or allegorical work, it can represent beyond its intentions; including pestilences both moral and metaphorical that have happened after Camus’ own lifetime.
 
The critic John Cruikshank insists that La Peste is also a reflection on “man’s metaphysical dereliction in the world,” in which case the applications are endless, and up to us. So it is worth reflection on this anniversary of his death: what would the plague signify now?
 
Nowadays, I think, La Peste can tell the story of a different kind of plague: that of a destructive, hyper-materialist, turbo-capitalism; and can do so as well as any applied contemporary commentary. In fact especially so, for this reason: the Absurd. Our society is absurd, and Camus’ novel examines – among many other things, and for all its moralising – our relationship to the absurdity of modern existence. It can describe very well the plague in a society which blares its phantasmagoria across the poor world so that millions come, aboard tomb ships or across murderous deserts, in search of its empty promises; and which even destroys the constant against which Camus measured human mortality: nature. Essential to Camus’ existential isolation was the discrepancy between the power and beauty of nature, and the desolation of the human condition. From his earliest days, he loved the sea and deserts, and saw man’s mortality in the light of their indifferent vastness.’(Ed Vulliamy)
 
[philosophy, history, literature]