What a beautiful, terrible book, one that revealed to a French public that the scourges, whether they be biological or ideological, reveal the same to the humans that endure them: that “people were always the same”, that “everyone, dead or guilty, was forgotten”, and yet “that there is more to admire in humans than there is to scorn.”
And this new translation by Laura Marris is a vast improvement over the Stuart Gilbert translation that the English speaking public has otherwise read for the last 70 years. Gone are the willful attempts to render heroic what Camus left plain and unadorned. Instead we read Camus as Camus intended: restrained and matter-of-fact at times, and yet interspersed with a searing lyricism that makes the heart ache. Bravo Laura 🫡