PENGUIN A Journal of the Plague Year

Acho pouco provável (praticamente impossível) que eu me interessasse em ler A Journal of the Plague Year (Diário do Ano da Peste, na tradução mais recente) se não fosse a pandemia. Mas, de longe, é o livro mais legível do Defoe. Já tinha lido (aos trancos e barrancos) Robinson Crusoe e Moll Flanders, e são praticamente impossíveis (pra não dizer insuportáveis) a não ser para alunos e alunas de Letras – dada a importância do autor na história do romance inglês.A Journal..., embora não pareça, é um romance, mas é construído como um diário, e bastante crível, do período de 1664 a 1665 quando Londres enfrentou a Grande Peste. Defoe tinha apenas 4 anos quando isso aconteceu, por isso não tinha como ser um livro de não-ficção ou, pior ainda, de memórias. Ele fez uma pesquisa bastante aprofundada e cria uma narrativa que se acompanha com muito interesse – especialmente por causa do que vivemos agora.É impressionante como algumas coisas existiram, embora sem o nome chic que têm agora: fake news, subnotificação, assintomático, transmissão comunitária etc. E também, naquela época, as classes mais pobres foram as mais afetadas. Numa introdução da edição da Penguin de 1966, Anthony Burgess escreve que “Dafoe foi nosso grande primeiro romancista porque foi nosso primeiro grande jornalista.” Aqui, o autor combina as duas prática, romance e jornalismo, e escreve um livro, que, quem diria!, é fundamental também para compreensão de nosso tempo – em especial de elementos que sobrevivem ao longo desses séculos, o que faz do livro bastante atual em alguns elementos – mesmo que não estivéssemos enfrentando uma pandemia.

I am reviewing the Oxford World's Classics paperback, 2010 revised edition, ISBN 13: 9780199572830. If you are interested in the Kindle edition, look elsewhere for a review.Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year is available in two inexpensive scholarly editions: this Oxford University Press paperback and the Norton Critical Edition, ISBN 13: 9780393961881. Both are worth owning. Their principle difference is that Norton prints its scholarly notes as footnotes at the bottom of the text page, while Oxford prints them as endnotes at the end of the book. To me that makes the Norton Critical Edition an automatic first choice. If you are comfortable reading with two bookmarks, one in the text and one in the notes, the Oxford paperback is cheaper ($9.95 vs. $16.25). Norton adds 105 pages of historical background and critical commentary, and if you are reading Defoe as a school assignment, it may save you a trip to your university library. Oxford has a medical note on the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis in modern epidemiology and in Defoe's (pp. 213-216) which is worth a library trip to read if you decide to buy Norton.In 1720, Europe's last outbreak of bubonic plague began in Marseilles. It killed 100 thousand in the city and the south of France, but it spread no farther. Of course, at the time no one knew it would be the last outbreak or that it would spread no farther. Capitalizing on fears of a renewed pandemic, in 1722 Daniel Defoe published his Journal of the Plague Year, a carefully researched account of the Great London Plague of 1665, presented as a journal "Written by a CITIZEN who continued all the while in London. Never made publick before" and signed H.F.One of Defoe's sources for his Journal was the diary of his uncle Henry Foe, who was trapped in London in 1665 because he dithered over whether to leave until it was too late for him to rent a horse. Defoe's contemporaries mistook the Journal for a diary manuscript written in 1665. When Defoe's authorship got out, it was regarded as an historical novel. It is neither. Defoe's Journal is fictionalized journalism like John Hersey's Hiroshima and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. We call this "New Journalism" but in 1722 all journalism was new, and Daniel Defoe was one of its inventors. His Journal sold well, but not nearly as well as it should have: he delayed publication to finish Moll Flanders, and other journalists beat him into print about the Marseilles outbreak. Contemporaneity is less an issue to us, and Defoe's Journal is well worth reading in our present pandemic, 299 years later.Like most good journalists, Defoe held political views not shared by his government. He agreed that closing the nation's borders was a good idea; but he thought that home quarantining everyone who had been exposed, the infected together with their households, was a cruel precaution which had not controlled the plague in 1665. He thought everyone showing symptoms should be cared for in well-funded public hospitals. What would Iron Lady have thought of that, if she had bothered to read Defoe?In his research Defoe studied the latest scientific and medical literature, as well as the literature available in 1665. There had been no advances in epidemiology in the intervening fifty seven years. He was aware of the theory that infectious diseases are caused by living microorganisms, and he rejected it as unscientific! Defoe accepted the scientific consensus of his time, that diseases were spread by effluvia — the exhalations, sweat, and excretions of the infected — which were rendered infectious by minute particles of decaying organic matter. Advocates of this mistaken theory campaigned for improved public sanitation, and it was public sanitation — municipal garbage collection, street sweeping, and underground sanitary sewers — which enabled the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), a large burrowing rat and strong swimmer, to displace the climbing black rat or "roof rat" (Rattus rattus) in Europe's cities. Sending the urban rat population underground ultimately ended the plague pandemics, by reducing close human contact with the rat and rat flea vectors of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis. Even bad 18th century science was better than no science.My favorite one-liner:"I must here take farther Notice that Nothing was more fatal to the Inhabitants of this City, than the Supine Negligence of the People themselves, who during the long Notice, or Warning they had of the Visitation, yet made no Provision for it . . . ."Due to a bindery error, my first copy of this Oxford paperback was missing the last 24 pages. Amazon shipped me a replacement the same day and I received it two days later. I returned my defective copy to Amazon at my neighborhood Whole Foods grocery, without paying for shipping or even bothering to wrap it.

A dry read for anyone other than an erudite. It's an historical novel.

Fascinating read! really elucidates thinking and attitudes of the times.Delivered within expected time. New book

Le Londres de 1665, la peste racontée par Daniel Defoe, les détails incroyables depuis les causes jusqu'à l'organisation de la ville, de la population, la violence de l'épidémie et ses aspects désastreux et effrayants ainsi que les conséquences de ce fléau, même s'il s'agit d'une fiction, c'est aussi un véritable témoignage.