Mathieu Laine is the author of the essay: You have to save the free world (Plon, 2019).
The era commands reason to reread La Pesteto better understand what is happening to us. If the next deconfinement rather invites to grasp the nature and the scrubland paths of La Prospérité du soleil or Noces , other literary treasures come to open our eyes to the behavior of men in times of pandemic.
We could thus have retained the plague of Thebes sent by Apollo in Oedipus King (Sophocles) or the epidemics of amnesia of A hundred years of loneliness (Garcia Marquez), of contagious blindness in L'Aveuglement (Saramago) or of poliomyelitis in Nemesis ( Roth).
Read also: Why we re-read La Peste de Camus
Each time, there is talk of quarantine, worry, disruption of moral benchmarks and stopped countries. As for the galloping disease, it embodies in all these writers a deeper evil than its physiological implications: Nazism in Camus, freedom grappling with fatality in Sophocles, colonization
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