It’s Life, That’s All: Albert Camus’ The Plague

Books are written on Florence and Athens. These cities have what it takes to entice or exalt. They appease a certain hunger of the soul whose nourishment is memory. But no one would have an idea to write on a city where nothing tempts the mind, where ugliness has taken on a measureless part, where the past is reduced to nothingness. And yet sometimes this is very tempting . . . Oran is one of these cities. (Opening, The Plague)