Caligula and Three Other Plays (Vintage International) - Softcover

Camus, Albert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593311272 ISBN 13: 9780593311271

Publisher: Vintage, 2023

Synopsis

Four thought-provoking masterworks for the theater by the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Stranger and The Plague, in a restorative new translation by Ryan Bloom that brings together, for the first time in English, Camus's final versions of the plays, along with deleted scenes and alternate lines of dialogue.

Though known for his novels that plumb the depths of absurdism, it was the theater stage that Camus called “one of the only places in the world I'm happy." After forming two troupes in his early twenties in Algeria, the prolific author moved to Paris for work, where between 1944-1949 he would go on to stage the four original plays gathered in this collection.

Caligula, his first full-length work for the stage, begins with the infamous Roman emperor in the throes of grief at the death of his sister Drusilla and tugs at the same essential question that haunts so much of Camus’s work: Faced with the nullifying force of time, which snuffs out even our grandest emotions, how does one go on living? And is there a limit to the hardness of the human heart?

Here too are The Misunderstanding, a murderous tangle of the longing for home and the longing for elsewhere; The Just, depicting the 1905 assassination of a Grand Duke in Moscow and testing the ethical limits of one’s belief in a political cause; and State of Emergency, an allegorical romp where The Plague itself appears as a central character, shedding new light on our current battles with viral disease and authoritarian regimes.

These are engaging, often incendiary works, now in fresh English translations that beg to be performed.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus published The Stranger—now one of the most widely read novels of this century—in 1942. Celebrated in intellectual circles, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.

From the Back Cover

'One word to tell the reader what he will not find in this book. Although I have the most passionate attachment for the theater, I have the misfortune of liking only one kind of play, whether comic or tragic.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593311272
• ISBN 13: 9780593311271
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592