Erin's Blog?

I'm having a hard time getting through the plague. It feels more like a textbook than a novel. The main problem is, it's boring. It goes on tangents about burials or the weather or whether or not people are going to cafes that last so long I started counting the pages. And once those sections finally end, the enjoyment I might feel for the more interesting chapters is dulled by how brain-fried I am by what I just read. When Camus wants to get a point across, he does so by ranting about it for roughly fifteen pages, then, a chapter later, fifteen more on the same subject.  The book jumps from character focused chapters to the mind-numbing "descriptive" chapters, and the former are the book's main redeeming feature. I really like all the characters in the book, even the questionable ones like Cottard and Rambert. They're well-rounded, they bring different perspectives to the narrative, and they're supportive and kind to each other (which seems insignificant ...

 As we've established, as a narrator, Jake doesn't express many emotions. He gives a bland, matter-of-fact description of what's happening around him, and often excludes himself from the picture he paints. As a result, us readers are forced to read between the lines to understand his emotional state, or to wait for the occasional lapse of his stoic demeaner.  My favorite of these lapses is when Jake's opinion on a certain French waiter gets a little too heated, and betrays his so far repressed emotions concerning the events in Spain. In this scene Jake is sitting in a café in France, and over tips a waiter he offended to earn back the man's "friendship." The successful interaction causes him to go on this tangent: "It felt comfortable to be in a country where it is so simple to make people happy. You can never tell whether a Spanish waiter will thank you. Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. N...