Plague

A slim, heart-wrenching, and rousing new book from the leading feminist writer Jacqueline Rose. In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began to infiltrate public consciousness, sales of The Plague, the classic novel by French philosopher Albert Camus, skyrocketed. At the same time, the virus`s toll surged exponentially. Amid the harrowing loss, many sensed a glimmer of possibility--the potential for radical empathy wrought by shared experience--even as the death-dealing divisions of class, race, gender, and citizenship were underscored like never before. We have been through a time of `living death` when, for millions across the globe, untold horror has seemed to infiltrate the very air we breathe. Jacqueline Rose`s trenchant new book unravels recent history via the lives and works of three extraordinary thinkers--Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil, each one afflicted by catastrophe. Their politics and private griefs, the depth of their understanding, fling open a window into our present crises. Rose, one of the most insightful thinkers on politics and psychoanalysis alike, has written a story of unusual range, spanning World War II to Russia`s invasion of Ukraine, surging domestic violence to emboldened anti-racist protest, the Spanish influenza to Omicron, Boris Johnson`s deranged optimism to Vladimir Putin`s megalomania. The Plague: Living Death in Our Times enacts a psychic reckoning for our moment and for the future to be forged in its aftermath.