It’s been a while since I read and wrote about any of the lovely little volumes in the Penguin Moderns box set; in fact, I see it was last October, which is fairly alarming!! However, I said in my no-plans-for-2019 post that I *did* want to pick these up again soon – and lo and behold! I have! 😀

Penguin Modern 17 – Create Dangerously by Albert Camus

See page for author [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve read a reasonable amount of Camus over the years, but pretty much always his fiction as far as I can recall; so a nudge to read some of his essays was always going to be welcome, and the three featured here are fascinating. The title piece is a speech which Camus delivered shortly after being awarded the Nobel prize, and is the longest; its focus is on the place of the artist in the modern world, the dichotomy of whether to focus on realism or not, and the relevance of art in the twentieth century. These are big topics, and Camus argues the case for art’s importance very strongly.

After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

Defence of Intelligence is a sobering discussion of how France must first make friends with itself after the horrors of the Second World War before it can extend friendship to the rest of the world Finally, Bread and Freedom is a stirring defence of liberty and justice.

We are on the high seas. The artist, like everyone else, must bend to his oar, without dying if possible – in other words, go on living and creating.

Camus is an invigorating commentator, and the essays provided me with much food for thought. Post-War France must have been an unsettled place in which to live, and as the world moved into the 1950s the general state of the world seemed no calmer. Camus was obviously someone who thought deeply about art’s place and relevance in that world, and reading these essays has made me keen to dig out more. I know I have some longer non-fiction pieces, and there is also this which I stumbled upon a while back in the Oxfam; so no excuse not to read Camus!

Penguin Modern 18 – The Vigilante by John Steinbeck

The second PM I read in this batch is quite different from the Camus, although it still deals with the harsher side of life. John Steinbeck is again someone I’ve read a reasonable amount of, although I have a considerably larger number of his books on the shelves which are unread as opposed to read… Most of the ones I *have* spent time with were pre-blog, and I was particularly taken with “Cannery Row”, “Travels With Charley” and “A Russian Journal” – more non-fiction than fiction, actually. I’ve never read his shorter works, though, so was interested to see what the Penguin Modern would bring.

McFadden Publications, Inc.; no photographer credited [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Well, what I encountered were three very different stories: all hard-hitting tales in their own way, and all very memorable. The title story is a dark one, getting inside the mindset of a member of a lynch mob. It’s painful and uncomfortable reading; Steinbeck doesn’t seem to be setting out to judge, simply to present the horrible thought processes of Mike, the protagonist, and leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. The Snake is equally dark, and I found this particularly hard to handle, dealing as it does (partly) with vivisection. A cold fish of a doctor experiments on the animals in his Cannery Row rooms; however, an encounter with a tall, dark woman who wants to buy a snake unsettles him and her motives are unclear. The final story, The Chrysanthemums, appears initially gentle, dealing with a farming couple and the wife’s encounter with a travelling pedlar. However, the whole meeting unsettles her very existence and the story is just as devastating as the others. These are powerful works and evidence of Steinbeck’s great talents as an author.

*****

Both of these Penguin Moderns were deeply stimulating, and left me wanting to read more of each author’s work – which has to be a good thing. Hopefully, reading these little volumes will continue to send me sailing into uncharted waters, as I do love to discover new and wonderful writing from all over the world!