The review of "The Plague" presents a thought-provoking analysis. The writing style is described as understated yet effective in driving home universal themes. It shows a deep understanding of human nature, believing in the overall good while not ignoring our weaker instincts. The story of Oran, with its similarity to other works like "Blindness" but without the supernatural, is captivating. The development of the plague mirrors the actions of 21st-century governments during the Covid-19 outbreak, making it eerily familiar. The characters, though sometimes representing ideas, present a range of responses to the crisis. Doctor Rieux's perspective offers touching scenes. The book makes readers question their own integrity in a crisis and has a surprisingly positive message about humanity's capacity to deal with adversity. Despite some minor flaws, it is a timeless and highly recommended read in these troubling times.

The Plague by Albert Camus is a classic that continues to resonate.

The story's themes of human nature, crisis, and the struggle for good are as relevant today as they were when the book was written.

It serves as a reminder of the importance of integrity and the power of humanity to overcome adversity.

Whether you are a fan of classic literature or looking for a thought-provoking read, "The Plague" is definitely worth checking out.

**The Plague and Existentialism**

The coronavirus has been aptly described as the 21st-century plague. Reading "The Plague" and relating it to our current world situation, especially in the context of what lies ahead in the next week, month, or perhaps even longer, can offer profound insights into existentialism. The virus spares no one; it's a matter of being in the wrong place at the right time. Some will unfortunately lose their lives, and there may not be elaborate funerals or memorial services. In fact, there could potentially be mass funerals, much like in the book.

"The Plague" is not just a story about a town succumbing to a plague; it's also an existentialist tract. The town's descent into chaos is exponential, leading to a pit of death, smoke, and groans, similar to the imagined hell of those with a religious consciousness. However, the plague has no connection to religion. The innocent and the guilty alike perish. Shady characters continue their sly ways, criminals evade justice, and the great and the good sleep soundly in their beds, but the plague levels the playing field: everyone is vulnerable.

This is an atheist world where there is no rhyme or reason. Blaming the situation on fate, an angry god, or questioning why the deities have ignored the increasing praises, appeals, and desperate petitions of the supplicants is fruitless. Even the comforting rituals of death and the consignment of the remains have mostly been abandoned. The plague affects almost everyone, and those who are spared are not special in any way.

The pacing of the novel is truly outstanding. It perfectly matches the descent into hell and the subsequent recovery into the sunlight and brisk sea air. At the end, after experiencing all the pain and darkness, I felt a sense of relief and refreshment, which is an unusual feeling for the conclusion of a book. I would rate this book a perfect 10 stars, golden ones indeed.

Read The Plague free here.
revised Sept 2019

I read this book deep into the night, a tenacious reader resolute in torturing herself with the despondency that pervades this novel. I attuned myself to the feeling that emanates from a person's futile attempt to flee. With each breath I inhaled, I could sense the helplessness of the characters, in the overwhelming clarification of exile spread across every page. It reminded me a little of Saramago's Death at Intervals, yet I favored the flow of this one.

One could view The Plague as either literal or figurative; it depends on the reader. I regarded it as both. In either case, the simple message is that you lose when you are blind or ignorant, when you choose to disregard the signs of impending death, whether it be spiritual or physical. You lose when love is suppressed and stoicism and cynicism take root in people's hearts. You lose when people give up because the signs were there, right in front of them, and the majority chose to ignore them until they found themselves affected. Yes, I am one of those readers who perceive the subtle messages in Camus's layered prose.

Here I am once more, carried away by the similarities this book shares with his other works that I have read, and yet I am still struck by the distinctiveness of this reading and how it stands apart from The First Man, even if it embodies some of the darkness of The Stranger. During brief intervals, there is poetry - thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone, under the vast indifference of the sky - but mostly, the prose is pointed, elegant, and unrelentingly grim.

Camus endured conflict in life. He witnessed what occurs when brothers and sisters turn against each other, and quite frankly, a close reading of this reveals his constant allusions to war and exile. A plague sweeps through the French Algerian city of Oran and isolates the people from the rest of the world. Although people notice the signs, like the doctor who should have known, they do not want to believe it. The symbolism of dead rats pervades the narrative structure, yet people are not as alarmed as they should be until much later. By then, it is too late because no one can leave and no one can enter. Some lose their loved ones, others abandon love. Mostly, people live for the present, not counting on the future because, as in war and suffering, once caught in its clutches, the grace of stoicism takes hold.

Call it a novel of the plague. Call it a war novel. Call it a novel of death. Call it a novel of pain and suffering. Call it Camus's cry for help during his country's dismal times.

When rats, those large grotesque rats, begin dying everywhere across the coastal town of Oran in Northern Africa, an uneasy, yet unheeded feeling among the townspeople slowly starts to take hold. At first, it's just a strange phenomenon that people notice but don't pay much attention to. However, as the days pass, the questions in their minds turn to fear. The subsequent fever that spreads like wildfire causes widespread panic throughout the town.

As quarantines are imposed and the town suddenly finds itself isolated from the outside world, life takes on a whole new and terrifying aspect. But our mild-mannered and selfless protagonist, Dr. Bernard Rieux, remains calm and composed. Despite the exhaustion that plagues him and the pestilence that surrounds him during his long days of trying to combat the disease, he refuses to give in to despair.

THE PLAGUE is a truly gripping and horrific tale. It delves deep into the themes of confronting death and the will to survive. Filled with Camus' usual philosophical points of view, it makes for an unforgettable read that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page. 4+ Stars.

**"The Plague" by Camus: A Reflection in the Context of the Current Pandemic**

Is it because I'm so tired of this damn virus that Camus' novel seems like too much rain for already overly wet ground? Without a doubt, it's for this reason that, despite the suggestiveness of its proposal - it's one of those novels that seem made to be discussed in a group until late at night - alone, in this situation, and perhaps also in part because of the tone that Camus chose, "the tone of an objective witness", I haven't enjoyed reading it as much as I surely should.

It was Camus himself who stated that his story had to be interpreted as the way France faced Nazism, and although taking the analogy to the end would be stretching things too much and in other cases it's directly impossible, it's true that the way viruses, organic or ideological, appear, expand, and the reactions adopted towards them have a lot in common, something of which in recent times we are unfortunately privileged witnesses.

It's also true that not all the reactions that have been in vogue in recent months appear in the novel. For example, there is no denialist group, beyond the initial self-defensive denials of every pandemic - Camus died shortly before Holocaust denialism resurfaced with force - nor is there anyone who accuses, singer or not, the Illuminati or some other similar group of its origin and/or exploitation. The French author's novel is more traditional in this sense and only collects the usual condemnation of the sinful people and the subsequent divine punishment. Nor do groups that would use the situation for their political or social ends with the audacity that has been done in our case appear in it. Finally, Camus never speaks of what happened there with toilet paper, although he does mention the shortage in pharmacies of mint tablets, so effective in avoiding a possible contagion, although not as much as the "protective medals or amulets of San Roque", very fashionable at that time.

Serious jokes aside, there are many other reactions that do appear in the novel and are fantastically portrayed. Like the little importance given to the danger at first, especially if it doesn't directly affect us, you know, something like what Bertolt Brecht told us in his famous poem; how unprepared it catches us and how abandoned we feel when we want to react and there's no way to stop it anymore; how quickly we go from caution to recklessness when poverty squeezes. Through these pages walk those who sacrifice themselves, those who fight until they have no more strength and although everything seems useless, those who give up, those who resign themselves, those who isolate themselves uselessly, those who are even favored by the phenomenon, those who manage to react coldly and effectively against those who abandon themselves to impotent sentimentalism, those who don't need gods to show solidarity with men and those who see in the plague a divine design against which one can neither nor should fight.

A situation like that of the plague, a very special catalyst for all our weaknesses, vices, and also virtues, in which kindness and brutal indifference shine with the same force, sacrifice and cruelty, selfishness and selflessness, boldness and cowardice, dedication and individualism... Because that's how we are and more, for I very much doubt that Camus is right when he says:

   “The evil that exists in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good will without clairvoyance can cause as many disasters as evil. Men are rather good than bad... The soul of the one who kills is blind and there is no true kindness nor true love without all the possible clairvoyance.”

But, leaving aside this optimistic predisposition of the author towards the goodness of man, there are other aspects in which the author hits the mark, like that "the habit of despair is worse than despair itself" or that happiness needs others or that it requires wide and open horizons. As a good friend always says, it's a folly to want to squeeze life by living as if it were the last day because if it were truly the last, we wouldn't have the strength or the desire to keep living and much less the ability to enjoy it. That's why we keep death as far away as possible, that's why we act as if it weren't with us, that's why only the danger of its proximity ends all happiness and the search for pleasure becomes tragic.

But above all things, Camus urges us never to forget that...

   “…the bacillus of the plague never dies or disappears, that it can remain dormant for decades in furniture, in clothing, that it patiently waits in bedrooms, in cellars, in suitcases, handkerchiefs and papers, and that one day the plague, for the misfortune and teaching of men, may wake up its rats and send them to die in a happy city.

All that man can win in the game of the plague and of life is knowledge and memory. Perhaps it was to that which Tarrou called winning the game!”

Especially in these times when memory seems so weak and the virus of authoritarianism, xenophobia and racism, of aporophobia and the demand for class privileges, of patriotisms and nationalisms that the rats from the basements of society are bringing back en masse to the surface threatens to devastate us all. You know:

   “There is always a moment in history when the one who dares to say that two and two are four is condemned to death.”

Dear friends, it was a great and interesting story... A story that once again speaks of the mindlessness of religious entities... The remarkable point in this story was that "Father Paneloux," like other mindless religious figures who attribute everything to God, considered "the plague" as a punishment from God and believed that its cure would also be achieved by God, unaware that God and the Savior were the same "Jean Tarrou," who was both the Savior of the people and a victim.

If I were in the place of , I would depict the fate of that stupid priest in the story in such a way that the rats would have a stinking funeral and seek his plague... And only his bombed cross would remain, and the rats that bathed in the holy water of the church and boasted of purifying themselves by washing in it.

I hope you enjoy reading this beautiful story.

Be victorious and be Iranian.

Lekarz mówi, że każdy sen ma jakieś głębsze znaczenie. Jednakże, moje sny często wydają się być bardzo dziwne i trudne do zrozumienia. Czasami śnię o rzeczach, których nigdy nie myślałem podczas dnia. Inne razy, moje sny są bardzo intensywne i emocjonalne, jakby były prawdziwymi doświadczeniami.

Czasami próbuję analizować swoje sny i znaleźć w nich jakieś wskazówki lub wiadomości. Jednakże, często jestem zmuszony do przyznania, że nie mam pojęcia, co one właściwie oznaczają. Byłoby ciekawie, jeśli mógłbym dowiedzieć się więcej o tym, jak interpretować swoje sny i jak wykorzystać ich znaczenie w moim życiu codziennym.

Może, kiedyś znajdę odpowiedzi na moje pytania i będę w stanie lepiej zrozumieć, co moje sny mówią o mnie i moim życiu. Jednakże, na razie, muszę być zadowolony z tego, że śnię i że każdy sen jest dla mnie unikalnym doświadczeniem.

3.5 out of 4 stars

This is the second novel of Camus that I have read. All the central ideas and beliefs of his are present here, just like in "The Stranger". The difference is that the setting of this story is in a town that is hit by the plague. And just like that, suddenly it comes, takes hundreds of people, and then suddenly... it leaves. Because as Camus believes in life, there is no deeper meaning, no logical explanation. So the town is initially held captive by death. No one can enter, no one can leave. "Freedom" is lost. But what freedom exists in a daily life where people live mechanically, like robots? Only under the threat of death does a meaning emerge in daily life, a common plan for all the citizens, and that is nothing other than to continue to live. To continue to struggle within this terrible illogic of life. Not to give up. And that's what they do. And thus comes the purification. Just like in "The Stranger". The symbols here are also quite clear and clever.

Despite all this, in no case did the plague appeal to me as much as "The Stranger" did. Maybe because it came second? Maybe because in this particular work, due to its size and due to more characters, the "action" was more divided from the self-centered stranger? In any case, as it is, for me it is one step below Camus' first work.

The Plague is a Roman work by Albert Camus, a French writer and philosopher who looked at it from different aspects. Perhaps the most important aspect is the attempt of a society to survive and stay alive when death and nothingness suddenly appear and the life and days that passed in a uniform way are suddenly valued, and man becomes the dear one of his loved ones and relatives. At a time when before the start of this disaster and misfortune, love and affection were wrapped up in their hearts towards each other.

While death does not make a difference between the poor and the rich and takes lives by the handful, some individuals like Dr. Bernard Rieux are in the process of trying to break and find a way to escape the plague and go to war against it, and some like Father Paneloux consider it a punishment and the will of God and submit to the death knell in advance, and even when they doubt their beliefs and thoughts, they consider their thoughts and wisdom to be insufficient and incomplete in the face of understanding this misfortune. And a group of individuals in society also take advantage of these conditions like a train and consider the plague a blessing.

The plague, like other events that occur for man during his life but are not believable, will end when we first believe in it. The plague that the old sick man in the novel says at the end of the story:

-This is the world. Others say "It's the plague, we were in the plague period" and even if they are not ashamed, they claim medals. But what does the plague mean? It's life. That's it.

Second reading.

This is truly an essential book.

If there is a canon, The Plague most definitely belongs in it.

There were several things that interested me during this reading.

Mostly, it was the narrator's penchant, which was highly effective, for writing about the town's collective mood.

This device seemed to me to be an improvement over the Soviet worker novels of that era (1947).

The prose is not exaggerated to triumphalist proportions.

(Surely there must be a scholar somewhere who has addressed this. I'll have to search the Library of Congress.)

Nor is there an idealized superman worker (like the Stankhovite), but rather portraits of individuals with both flaws and great strengths.

One wonders to what extent the novel had a didactic intent.

By making this observation, I do not mean to trivialize the book's elegant high style, its sheer brilliance, or its profound insights into life, death, and duty.

This is an astonishing book, and I highly recommend it.

P.S. A new translation of Exile and the Kingdom was published in 2007.

Can a new translation of The Plague be far behind?

Let's hope not. After all, this current translation was published in 1948!

It had long bothered me that despite my over two-decade-long interest in historical epidemiology, particularly the Black Death, I had not read the three classic plague-related novels that gained popularity during the start of the covid pandemic. I had started "Journal of the Plague Year" and "The Decameron" a couple of times in my twenties, but I had never seriously considered reading Camus' "The Plague". Wherever I browsed Camus' books, it never seemed as prominent as his other works. Besides, I generally preferred pre-19th century stories about plagues.

I find it increasingly offputting to read a book when it has a lot of buzz on Goodreads, as "The Plague" did a few months ago. I either want to have read it before the hype or a good while afterwards. But not during the scrum, these tiring mass-reads that remind me more and more of frantic Boxing Day shoppers.

This year, however, I wanted to read at least one of these books. Given that I had not read them previously, it would have felt like "but you weren't there" if I didn't. And the Camus, being the most recent, was the easiest to read and also fit into one of the few still-empty categories in a reading challenge.

I settled on the old Gilbert translation. When I tried a few pages of the current Penguin edition, translated by Robin Buss, it was dry and dull as I always find his stuff. Why does Penguin persist in subjecting book buyers to Buss's translations? And why replace the more readable old one? If it's about accuracy, there are surely plenty of French literary translators who can be both accurate and more interesting than Buss. The Penguin's afterword by Tony Judt is useful, though. It confirmed, as I suspected, that the curious focus on characters stranded in Oran and missing loved ones abroad is based on Camus' personal experience.
None of the English covers for this novel are good in my opinion, and this translation especially has bad ones. The US one was the least worst. The most recent UK edition of the Gilbert translation has a now-sort-of-sadly-amusing "Mail on Sunday" quote on the cover, which would have been apposite to post. But the rest of the blurry design hurts the eyes when looked at on a screen for more than a few seconds.
The beginning of the Gilbert translation seemed quite involving. But I never thought the novel as a whole would be such a page-turner. It was exciting in a way I'd never found Camus exciting. "The Fall" was a slog for me (possibly Robin Buss' fault), and "The Stranger" was a slow read, though I found Meursault quite interesting. Before this year, "The Myth of Sisyphus" was the only other Camus I thought I might still make myself read because of a student babysitter from my childhood who read it. Yet I actually turned to "The Plague" when I was finding another book unexpectedly slow going but was still trying to keep to that reading challenge.
It had a thriller-like vivid tension. It can be read literally as being about an outbreak of plague, not just an allegory. And at those moments where it's inaccurate or illogical because it's actually an analogy for the Nazi occupation and war, if read literally as being about a plague outbreak, they just feel like the flaws that come with the territory in a certain sort of dystopian thriller. I'm well-used to forgiving those in stories that press the right buttons, which I've usually had to find in B-grade American TV shows. Camus' novel is far better written at the sentence and description level than most trashy dystopian entertainment products, and it also doesn't take entirely standard routes in its storytelling.
It struck me while reading this that I look for and prefer to avoid various highly specific tropes in these types of stories. The most important subdivision of dystopias for me is whether it's a breakdown-of-authority dystopia or an authoritarian dystopia. In Camus' "The Plague", there is no substantial breakdown of authority; authoritarianism is increased, so it counts as an authoritarian dystopia, albeit not to what I'd guess is a "Hunger Games" level.
In comparison with Camus' "The Fall", where philosophical themes are always overtly present, it's easy to read "The Plague" literally from the start. The rats are such a specific and material sign of plague. There are occasional philosophical moments where plague is clearly an allegory for war, but after these, the story mostly reverts to a narrative that can be read as plague qua plague. One of the "debates" in the novel, between Paneloux and Rieux, was frustrating if read literally. Although they are supposed to be opposed, they are actually similar in that neither thinks about how humans are animals and get diseases and die as animals do, nor takes the historical perspective that outbreaks of infectious disease are not uncanny.
The novel doesn't have a lot of period detail, but two instances stood out. Tarrou's backstory as an activist made me realize that anti-death penalty campaigning must have been a big thing in Europe before it was abolished. The pensioner who spends his days counting dried peas between two pots gives a sense of the sort of boredom-filling activities that media, and especially smartphone games and videos in recent years, have replaced for some people.
For all that Camus often seems on point when reading the novel literally, having cars prohibited was a stretch too far even if read in the context of inaccuracies in thrillers. It was too obviously something an occupying army might do but made no sense during an epidemic while trams still ran. He also used the old cliché of the sufferer "fighting" an illness, which stood out especially in a scene late in the book.
As another big theme of 2020 has been racial protest, and "The Plague" is set in French-colonised Algeria, it's glaring that there is next to nothing in the novel about the local Algerian population, their relations with the French, and their reactions to the plague and regulations. It would have been really interesting to hear about these people, but one could read the novel assuming that Oran was settled entirely by Europeans or even that it was somewhere in Europe. As far as I know, North Africans are really neglected in classic French literature.
For all Camus' radicalism, "The Plague" arguably colonises Oran on a metaphorical level even more thoroughly than it was colonised in real life by using the city as a stand-in for mainland France. The occupiers of Oran are not the French but a deadly infectious disease, and its named victims, the locals, appear to be French.
A novel like "The Plague" is, of course, the last thing some people want to read at the moment, while to others it's been a must-read this year. But even where it was disagreeable, it was engrossing and propulsive. I'd love to know about Camus' research for the novel - if he had read accounts of then relatively recent plague outbreaks in China and India and was working from those, or if it was all made up of readings about early-modern European plagues plus imagination and allegory.

April 194.., the plague descends upon Oran in Algeria, and the number of daily mortal cases multiplies rapidly. However, the prefecture is reluctant to declare "the state of the plague" for fear of alarming public opinion. A few weeks later, faced with the emergency, the prefect orders the city gates to be closed.

Oran is thus isolated, separated, and cut off from the rest of the world. As a result, the inhabitants find themselves "prisoners of the plague," and the city resembles a condemned place.

The epidemic progresses inexorably. The plague strikes everywhere, keeping the city firmly under its grip. It becomes a "collective affair," and even those who do not contract "that sickness" carry it in their hearts.

The plague forces the inhabitants to open their eyes and think and react. Each individual chooses his side and adopts a unique attitude.

Albert Camus populates his narrative with key figures such as Rieux, the doctor; Cottard, the trafficker; Grand, the town hall clerk; Paneloux, the priest; Tarrou, the chronicler; Rambert, the journalist, and so on. Each of these protagonists embodies a different morality in the face of the scourge. Yet, despite their differences on various levels, they prove to be "men of goodwill" who act together to defeat the plague.

Camus compares (albeit implicitly) the plague with war, the rise of Nazism, and the struggle of men against the scourge to represent resistance.

In his book, men占据 a prominent position, as if the plague only concerns them. We can thus deduce that conflicts are a solely human affair! Women are relegated to a secondary place, overshadowed. They sometimes appear as sources of sweetness, comfort, or support for men, rather than as thinking beings.

In his work, the author depicts a community united in the same struggle, demonstrating that the effects of the scourge on a man can transform his mindset, feelings, and worldview. Above all, it shows that we are all equal in the face of death.

A work of high quality, some passages are terrifyingly realistic, with the progression and ravages of the plague described in minute detail.

The scene of the child's agony is one of the most painful passages, as we helplessly witness his suffering and his inevitable death.