Currently reading
Days of Throbbing Gristle
The Colonel
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre
A Room of One's Own
Les Misérables
Caligula
One Star!Yes! one star to Caligula by Albert Camus.
Although Albert Camus is one of my favorite writers, but i didn't like it. During reading this play, i was waiting for one unique dialogue that showed it WAS from Albert Camus; the writer of [b:The Stranger|49552|The Stranger|Albert Camus|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1349927872s/49552.jpg|3324344] and [b:The Plague|11989|The Plague|Albert Camus|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1342837610s/11989.jpg|2058116], but i couldn't find it.
I have special respect for The Stranger and The Plague. These two books shook my world in the right period of my life that a book can change someone's life. They were new windows that opened a new chapter in my life.
As the matter of fact this play was written in 1938, before The stranger (1942).
Here is the theme of the play presented by the author himself (in the U.S. edition of Theater in 1957):
Caligula, a relatively kind prince so far, realizes on the death of Drusilla, his sister and his mistress, that "men die and they are not happy." Therefore, obsessed by the quest for the Absolute and poisoned by contempt and horror, he tries to exercise, through murder and systematic perversion of all values, a freedom which he discovers in the end is no good. He rejects friendship and love, simple human solidarity, good and evil. He takes the word of those around him, he forces them to logic, he levels all around him by force of his refusal and by the rage of destruction which drives his passion for life.
But if his truth is to rebel against fate, his error is to deny men. One cannot destroy without destroying oneself. This is why Caligula depopulates the world around him and, true to his logic, makes arrangements to arm those who will eventually kill him. Caligula is the story of a superior suicide. It is the story of the most human and the most tragic of errors. Unfaithful to man, loyal to himself, Caligula consents to die for having understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free in opposition to other men.