L'Etat

I found L'Etat much less effective in terms of concepts than La Peste. Yes, the parallels to dictatorship, for example that of Franco, are more obvious by making the plague a person, but it loses the sublety of the novel. One begins to read everyone as a symbol of something rather than a character. Nada is nothing, the secretary becomes bureacracy and the way in which the play ends, with love conquering the plague is rendered obvious and saccharine. I think that the play isn't meant to be realistic in the way that the novel is, but by losing this grounding in a fixed reality, it becomes harder to empathise with characters and appreciate them as anything other than signifiers of Camus' ideology.