The Shelter Series: James Longenbach

We’ve invited the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers to send us paragraphs on their current reading for a new series, SHELTER. We’ll be posting these regularly over the next couple of weeks. 

James Longenbach

I’m reading—what else?—Albert Camus’ The Plague, beautifully translated by Stuart Gilbert, who also was a friend of Joyce and wrote a seminal book about Ulysses.  I first read The Plague, or part of the book, in high school back in the ‘70s, and about ten years ago I read The First  Man, Camus’s delicate, gorgeous last novel about his boyhood in north Africa.  Like anybody, I was done in by the Maupassant-like clarity of that book, a clarity that survives or is even enhanced by its translation, and I didn’t go back to his earlier novels, dismissing them in my mind as more overtly allegorical.  Now I’m chagrined to say that The Plague, while certainly more idea-driven, is also a transparent, beautiful book, and I’m even more chagrined that it took our present, woeful circumstances to make me feel that.  But I have to finish the book!  More importantly, the novelist Joanna Scott, to whom I’m married and who looks at La Repubblica each morning along with the Times, reports that for the first time Italy is reporting a downturn in the virus this morning.  So there’s a little hope.