Bubonic Insomnia

All right! Yes, we did take a hiatus. We were on holiday. It was amazing. We read many books, but we had internet limitations.

Currently, Bleak House is destroying my soul, so I thought I'd take a reading break and do a quick update.

Let us start with The Last September (since that is the first one that I read). I elected to read this one on a transatlantic flight, which proved to be an excellent decision. This is because the first flight was one where I was supposed to fall asleep, and if this book doesn't cure insomnia I don't know what will. Truly, nothing happened. At all. This was actually sort of the point of the book, I think. It's kind of a coming of age story in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, which actually sounds like it has some promise. However, the book is amazingly dull. I was actually quite disappointed, because I loved The House in Paris (and even The Heat of the Day was pretty good). I have a ton of Bowen's left, so hopefully this was the fluke and not the other way round.

After that, I decided to read The Plague, mostly because I found a left copy in the reading material stand at the gym. How amazing is that? This is a book about an Algerian town that faces the plague sometime in the 1940s. Now, I know that this sounds truly terrible, sort of about the worst book one can imagine, but please believe me, it is not. It's actually very beautiful in a sort of morbid way, and captivating. It's a bit bleak, but also hopeful in a way that only a work that real sees into the absolute darkness of the world without flinching can be. I'm not explaining this very well.

Here's an example quote "He knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of final victory. It could be only the record of what had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts." The whole book is like this. It's captivating, and it explores so, so, so many issues. You could do a whole course just using this book as a spring board. I'm always fascinated by ways people cope with facing horrific aspects of life over and over again, and my favorite passage of this book is a scene where the doctor and his friend decide to take an afternoon for their friendship to remind themselves the purpose of their work, the world the're working towards.

One of these books was abandoned in Venice and one in Munich. I wonder if anyone is reading them now.