The Plague Paperback – June 20, 2022

Camus' story is older than WWII, and it is timely for 2020 America. The plague that closed a North African metropolis in this fiction was carried by rats, and was ended by cold weather. While covid-19 behaves differently, people living through the current plague may see their situations and feelings reflected in Camus' story. Then and now, these range from hope and impatience at lockdowns, to loneliness, anxiety, and a need to live life fully right now - despite the dangers of crowding into bars and events, and being intimate with people, when anyone could be infected.Camus develops a range characters - dedicated doctors and volunteers, sick people and their family members, unemployed who become essential workers, a con artist who thrives on the chaos, an official who grows a heart when his son dies, a preacher who decides to embrace horrors to keep his faith, friends exulting in the release of a forbidden swim at sea, ...and lovers struggling to keep love alive when life demands hard hearts or enforced distance.Parallel to the plague, then and now, runs the threat of facism. Camus resists preaching politics openly, but the allegory is powerful, in the characters and their struggles, and in the disease fought like a war. The novel concludes with celebrations that the plague has ended, reunions of lucky lovers, and a caution. For the deadly germs can lie in hiding, for years, only to rise again.Did we think facism was defeated in 1945? Are new strains alive in 2020? The Plague by Camus does not have the answers, but it has some wisdom to help us better navigate the present and the future.

A lovely and enjoyable reading experience. Outstanding development of character and vivid setting of scene. A good story, well told. Only reason it did not get five stars? I thought the narrative would never end! Too long. But, overall a worthwhile read. Recommend.

It should be required reading for any health care professional. The risk of helping is to gain empathy. Unless you are a psychopath.

The book itself is fine and a great translation. My biggest problem are that they do not add spaces for paragraph breaks, so it feels like reading the old man and the sea. Another that I have is there are no page numbers. Finally, I don’t like how the chapters are hidden mid paragraph. You are looking for Roman numerals that are the same size as the regular text.

This book was chosen by my book club . I found the beginning slow and may not have finished were it not for book club. It describes the way different people respond to a plague and one can see these responses among people around us now. Written as an allegory about the rise of the Nazis in Europe it also has parallels to the current political situation in the U.S. This book was written in 1947 and is set it what was at that time French Algeria. what I kLiked best input this book is that it provides a perspective or a number of perspectives and provides a great deal to think about.

This paperback version is in a weird format. It is 8x10 letter size, with no page numbers and oddly spaced words on pages. Immediately returned.

I homeschool my teens and this was for our world literature unit.I had not read this myself since the 80’s, and I found it much better than I remembered.I like that the writer is unsentimental and yet so kind about the humanity of the people stricken by plague.Great use of vocabulary; we read this immediately after Kafka and while both are “modern,” this book only tiptoes along the edge of the surrealism that Kafka plunges into.Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky after Christmas.

It certainly was topical. I found the characters hard to delineate. (Take notes.) It was, I thought, rather in the style of Hawthorne - surprising for such a recent book. If you're not sick (ha) of plague and stories of plague, it's pretty interesting.

We have no excuse. This book informed our culture, and we somehow ignored it??? What fools we are.

The condition of book when it arrived, was really good. Thank you amazon for the lovely service. Looking forward...

‘The Plague’ has become a best-seller again during the Covid-19 pandemic. It speaks to us as much today as it did to post-war readers in the 1940s. Humanity is always getting itself into trouble and never seems to learn fully from the past. Camus writes that ‘the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely’. Inevitably, plague returns in other guises - war, drought, fire etc. We do, of course, have one massive advantage in the 21st Century because many people have access to the internet. It is possible for friends and families to keep in touch, so we don’t forget each other’s faces or voices as easily as they seem to do in ‘The Plague’.A Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, Albert Camus received many other plaudits in his lifetime and ‘The Plague’ is still widely read – rightly so. In addition, Robin Buss has created a masterly English translation in the edition I read. Many students must have dissected this book from myriad viewpoints, including existentialism, religion, and philosophy. For a relatively small book it packs a mighty literary punch.War and pestilence inevitably change people. Whereas the plague is the making of Grand when he eventually overcomes his paralysis, writes to his wife, and resumes his book, it slowly grinds down Dr Castel in his desperate search for an effective serum. Cottard flourishes during the plague and goes mad once it is over. The only option was to learn how to live as a human despite the ‘endless trampling that flattened everything in its path’.Camus refers to objectivity and this reminds me of the most powerful book I have ever read – ‘If This is a Man’ by Primo Levi, in which Levi recalls, with complete objectivity, his experiences as a Jew incarcerated in Auschwitz. Such horror needs no embellishment; indeed it is all the more powerful without it. I was reminded of Levi’s book when Camus refers to the mass graves and train convoys to the incineration ovens. We can be in no doubt he is referring to the Holocaust.When death, like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, arrived in town, all eyes turned to Father Paneloux for succour and an explanation. At first, Paneloux preached from the pulpit that this was a judgement from God – the congregation were being punished for their misdeeds. But as the bodies piled up, he joined the volunteers in their fight against the plague. The populace pays less attention to him when he claims that God is testing their faith. Religion is seen as less relevant in this crisis.For me, the glaring omission of central female characters was disappointing. At the time of first publication in 1947, many women had fought bravely in the resistance and others worked in factories producing planes, tanks, and armaments. Women in this book have been reduced to absent ciphers. Rieux waves goodbye to his wife as she departs for treatment at a sanitorium and, later, dies. Rambert pines for his absent girlfriend in Paris and then hugs her at their reunion, after having chosen to stay in Oran to fight the plague. The only ‘present’ woman is Dr Rieux’s mother whose role is do housework, then sit nicely in a chair, mostly in silence, exuding ‘goodness’. To be fair to Camus though, even the men are representative and not the fully rounded characters we often anticipate finding in novels.Who can argue with Camus when he writes, ‘there is more to admire in men than to despise’, or, ’if there is one thing that one can always desire and sometimes obtain, it is human affection’?Despite the absence of strong women, I think this classic is an important and well-written novel with a powerful message for generations to come about what it means to be human in the face of adversity.I recommend it to other readers and give it 9 out of 10.

Libro come descritto

Great book, and very up to date and many thoughts to think about. It gives One much to think about.