See Inside!The Plague by Albert Camus: Book Cover

    The Plague by Albert Camus, Erroll McDonald (Editor), Stuart Gilbert (Translator), Stuart Gilbert (Translator)

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    (Paperback - Reissue)

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    Synopsis

    A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature.

    Annotation

    An epidemic serves a telling symbol for the Nazi occupation of France, and, by extension, for human existence as a whole.

    Books of the Century; New York Times review August 1948 - Stephen Spender

    The Plague is parable and sermon, and should be considered as such. The Plague stands or falls by its message. The message is not the highest form of creative art, but it may be of such importance for our time that to dismiss it in the name of artistic criticism would be to blaspheme against the human spirit.

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    Customer Reviews

    An amazing bookby rmishou

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    November 18, 2008: Camus' classic is a must read. As much great literature does, this book works on several levels. It is a clear allegory about the dangers of fascism. The plague begins to appear with the dramatic increase in dead rats. The dangers are largely ignored until things have worsened and it is too late to stop the calamity. Couple this allegory with astute insight into the psychology of human nature and Camus' work borders on amazing. The town seems to resign themselves to their fate, barely fighting, as if already defeated. This book does not fall back to a typical medical thriller where the source must be found and millions are saved at the last minute. Instead, Camus has people die and react to the indiscriminate nature of the disease, killing young and old, rich and poor. As expected there are those who profit from disaster and those you have the money to buy the slowly disappearing food, but Camus resists the urge to cheapen his book with tricks and fabricated action scenes. This books is an intense, existential study of the human psyche in the face of a natural disaster or, allegorically, a dangerous, oppressive government bent on killing individuality and imagination. Camus leaves the reader with the chilling reminder that the plague can lie dormant for years and return at any time.

    The Plague and the sadness it caused meby Anonymous

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    February 15, 2005: The book starts off in the simple town of Oran life is going just fine for most of the people in this town. All is fine until soon many rats start dying there are dead rats everywhere in the town and the poor doctor Rieux is not having a good time for his wife is very ill and so he has to send her on her way to a place where she can supposedly be taken better care of so he sends her away. The thousands of rats that were dying have decreased and now there are a few people falling mysteriously ill and then dying of unknown causes. The symptoms of the disease are unlike any that Dr Rieux has ever seen and he cannot seem to think what might be the problem causing the deaths are but he does know that it is connected to the mass death of rats that previously attacked the town. Quicker than they know what struck the people, more and more people begin to die even people quite close to the doctor. The story switches form time to time but it still is very interesting. At times the story can be very sad for you know that at a time this happened to people during the ?Black Death? (Bubonic Plague). In the end of the story I began to feel a lot of sorrow for the people that had to go through such pain. Rieux lives the bubonic plague but as the few other towns people celebrate the end of the disaster he thinks that the celebrations will not last long for the disease will be back to take the lives of more people which is true for as he thinks I think, diseases can lie dormant for a long time and then come back.


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