The Plague

Great read!

Everyone should read this book. The story is riveting and you learn a lot about human motivation and responses to this. The book itself is a nice hardcover which is very sturdy and well bound

Merci pour cet ouvrage très simple et écrit gros. Le texte de Camus est bien traduit et reflète la même ambiance qu'en Français.A recommender

Camus has an amazing knack for writing about human struggles and suffering in a realistic way. The many descriptions of the citizens of the port city of Oran, Algeria during an onslaught of plague really sucks the reader in and forces them to realize the absurdity of life, illness and death. Most of the time, Camus was able to convey his absurdist and humanist ideas through the characters in ways that didn’t seem too intrusive or didactic, but the book may nonetheless come across to some as being too philosophical. There are many interpretations of the novel, but I prefer to think that Camus simply meant it as a story of the absurd struggle during absurd times.The style was amazing. I really appreciated the beautiful, original metaphors and imagery, particularly the following: “ ...the sea spread out before them, a gently heaving expanse of deep-piled velvet, supple and sleek as a creature of the wild.” This is just one of many stunningly delightful descriptions. Stuart Gilbert did an amazing job, although he did not always follow the exact phrasing of the original French. Nonetheless, the book is wonderful and a joy to read.I am so glad I read this during the COVID-19 pandemic. It gave me so many parallels to think about and is a good guide to step back and rethink some of the life choices you’ve made. It is amazingly relevant to the present day, even though it was written over half a century ago and is based on a cholera outbreak that happened in the 1840s in Oran. I have learned about the basics of absurdism and find it to be a very interesting topic. So, especially right now, during COVID, definitely read this!The reason I am giving the novel four stars is because I didn’t think that Camus did a good job writing in an emotionally affecting way. I read through the parts where a young boy dies, and others where the ordeal of the illness is described in great detail, without shedding a single tear. In the happy parts, I didn’t really laugh either. And although the emotions of the characters are portrayed in a very realistic way, the writing itself is very dry. This, to me, is a big drawback.Overall, I think that it is a book to read, during crises especially, to gain insights about human nature during challenging times. Definitely worth a read (just, according to the other reviews, don’t get the kindle edition…;-)).

Shakespeare’s use of decisive language permeated his plays in such ominous proclamations as this : “A Plague on Both Your Houses“.This line marks the end of a love story, possibly the greatest ever told, that was surrounded by a plague that decimated Europe during the 14th. century. Here lovers are masked at balls and the cover of the night, acts of violence are played out in near secrecy, and plots to unite two houses are conducted under the auspices of shrift. Proprietary caution yields to unbridled passion, pent up manhood finds untimely and mortal resolutions, and sage potions and machinations are exposed by the unfolding events that these misdirections bring.In Camus’s “The Plague” there also exist two households in Oran where he laid his scene. However, the medieval world of social prescriptions, decorum, and refinements which masked hidden desires and troubled souls, has given way to a world irony where one’s soul and faith twinkle and dance like listless fireflies on a summer’s humid night. These agitated and listless souls are driven inside to their homes by a virus, one that they can neither see or understand until it begins to take its toll. Citizens of Oran are driven into their homes and away from jobs, income, and social discourse as the deaths grow. Their homes become their shelter and their prison all at once. And despite all the warnings, the bars and restaurants are peopled with those who are willing to risk their very lives for moments of a sameness that defies the reality of the Plague and its ability to disrupt life as they once knew it.The other house is the self that struggles with limitations, realizations of power of the unknown, the longing to return to time that is not consumed with fear and loathing. Camus refused to accept the label of existential when applied to his writings. For one it’s a term that is baggy in its general application of moments of unknown or supercharged meaning to individuals in the universe at large. Actually, as the late,great Professor Hubert Dreyfus explained, the term has very specific applications in different philosopher’s work. Kierkegaard saw it as a means of coming to term with a “sickness unto death”. The resolution the other house, is to the plague of the self that was desperate revealing itself as commitment. Camus tracks this type of commitment through a myriad of characters that truly establish and exhibit a defining relationship/commitment in their dedication and resolve to fight the plague and help their fellow man in doing so.Camus has the unknown narrator observe early on in the novel: “...rats died in the street; men in their homes.” But, it is the “knights of faith“ that by taking actions and individual leaps of faith into perilous unknown, that restore the life of Oran, and return it to the days before the plague. At the end of the novel he warns the readers that the rats could be roused and sent out to die in another happy city. If so, and when, we already know his answer to such an ensuing struggle: faith and commitment.