The Plague

Rating:
Summary: Existential exploration of the dilemmas of "humanity"...
Review: Camus' Plague is a brilliantly crafted allegory, exploring the fundamental dilemmas of "humanity." Lest you worry that the characters are over-generalized symbols, I state emphatically the contrary. They are tangible and vivid; you smell the smoke of their cigarettes, note the throbbing of their temples in their moments of duress. Simply put, I have never felt so much empathy, save for those I know to be real. The Plague explores and develops every emotion and mythic theme confronting humanity. Faustian, Biblical, Existential themes, and more, are all expressed in language so agonizingly simple and beautiful that one need not even consider them to derive greatest enjoyment from this work. You will wonder at Camus' penetrating insights, you will struggle to understand, you will occasionally set down the book to allow the latest words to permeate your mind, and, finally, when you have finished, you will read it again. And, perhaps, again...

Rating:
Summary: The Timeless Metaphor: The Human Condition under siege
Review: Albert Camus, whose life was dominated by World War II and his participation in the French underground resistance, and whose enigma it was to try to understand how such chaos and war and pain had come to the world in which he lived, realized in his book "The Plague" the perfect metaphor for war.

One character after another is portrayed in his city of birth, Oran, Algeria as they cope with a "plague" visiting their city, and keeping them prisoners there. The plague, of course, is the war, and Camus' poignant understanding of the human condition and the idiosyncratic ways in which evil is generated by human actions and inactions is the foundation of this superb work of fiction.

His life's work, was to promulgate the theory that we are each responsible for one another, and that every action matters and reverberates within the universe. It is a kind of existentialism and a recognition of how inertia and neediness undermines the will toward good. In his work "The Fall" this double nature of human beings is fully realized. In "The Plague" we are deeply moved by how human beings behave within a state of crisis.

Camus' insights and his philosophy have deeply influenced my own thinking when trying to cope with the present and to understand the horrors of the past, IE the Holocaust and human evil. He offers both insight and hope.

Rating:
Summary: "Hats off!" to Camus!
Review: It is July, I am in my forties, and I have finally begun reading Camus. First, I read The Stranger. Today, I just finished The Plague. Unlike some reviewers who "had" to read the book, I have had the pleasure of voluntarily escaping into both of these masterful classics, which were apparently not required reading for me in high school or college. I did not select them for a summer beach read, but read them after my husband brought them home from the library. Suffice it to say, our dinnertime discussions have had a little more depth of late.

One of the eeriest qualities of Camus' writing is how the applicability of his timeless writing gives one pause: in a post 9/11 society, even one of his last sentences in The Plague takes on new meaning: "...in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts..."

My husband worked on a project in Shanghai during the SARS epidemic there and noted that he could identify with some aspects of the book, especially as he went about the town as a tourist and saw the shopkeepers manning virtually deserted stores. I recall helping supply his suitcase with Purell and dustmasks and wondering if he would wind up being quarantined.

I recall shuddering some years ago at a newspaper account of nurses faced with the fear of encountering an unknown, lethal disease at local New Mexico hospitals. The disease was eventually diagnosed as Hantavirus but the nurses at the hospital were merely given ice cream in the employee lounge as some sort of comfort-measure. At the time, I was glad that I had not pursued a career in nursing.

Nevertheless, I am in total admiration for the characters of Dr. Rieux and Tarrou and the book has somehow, hopefully, ennobled me, in a way that motherhood and maturity have not completed. I have a much greater admiration for those in the medical profession and much more sympathy for humanity and the plight of being human than I did before reading this book. Would that I aspire to being like Tarrou...siding with the victim in any situation, "...so as to reduce the damage done."

"Hats off" to Camus for changing 21st century lives!

Rating:
Summary: Companions to The Plague
Review: Few authors can deliver such a strong philosophical message through the form of a novel as Camus did with The Plague. Those who appreciated this level may also find Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov to have a similar effect. The Norton Critical Edition with the C. Garnett trans. (ISBN 0393092143) is especially comprehensive.

Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (ISBN 0691117926) is a great companion to either of these works, as it confronts in particular the subject of evil in the context of history, philosophy, and such literature as these works represent.

Rating:
Summary: Decisions...
Review: This book isn't overly engaging, it is somewhat shocking at times, and its prose is probably too dry. Despite that, I highly recommend it to you... Why?. Well, the reason is simple. The plot of "The Plague" is merely a way of understanding something that has to do with our everyday life, and the way we live it.

Succinctly, the story begins when a plague strikes the North-African town of Oran. People at first try to ignore the clues that show that something bad is happening. When they cannot help but recognize that things are seriously wrong, a quarantine is declared. For those inside the walls of Oran, reality changes: death is omnipresent, and loneliness and despair, feelings they must confront. Different people react in diverse ways to the same reality, and we get to know about them through the narrator of this book, that also happens to be one of the protagonists. The real question that most of the persons in Oran ask themselves sooner or later is whether is it worthwhile to fight against the plague, when the outcome in that unfair war is almost certain death...

I won't give you the answers they find, if any. For that, you need to read the book... However, I can tell you Albert Camus' opinion. Camus (1913-1960) thought that it is in the fighting against evil that mankind finds its greatness (and maybe justification, who knows), even if we face what might seem at first sight a desperate situation. In a way, I think that for Camus the plague was in this case an allegory of evil, and our attitude against it. That evil changes faces, but always reappears, and it is again time to make choices, and decide what kind of attitude we will take. It is only in the right decisions that we will find the meaning we were searching for.

Again, recommended...

Belen Alcat


Rating:
Summary: A Tough Read
Review: I have to say, I did not understand this book. I am probably one of the top english students in my high school class, one of the most capable of staying open minded while reading any book.

But this book I simply could not understand. There were brief moments throughout the book where I would understand and I could tell what an incredible writer this man was. I can't tell you what translation it was that I did read, but maybe it was partly that...maybe it was because I was also reading an extremely poor translation of the Death of Ivan Ilyich at the time, but for whatever reason, I feel as though I missed the big idea of this book.

To me, the only thing that is memorable is the amount of death.

However, I am extremely willing to give it another go-- but it will have to wait until I get through my Russian kick and until I read a few pages of several different translations.

Rating:
Summary: Dull
Review: I tend to agree with some minority reviewers that this book is boring and dull. It has some interesting thoughts here and there, but that is all. All in all, the book is quite over rated.

Rating:
Summary: 1 star, to balance out these rave reviews
Review: I guess this should be more like 3 stars, but I am baffled by these rave reviews. I started this in high school and abandoned it after about 100 pages because it seemed to be going nowhere.

Last year I read The Stranger and loved it (although it's a much quicker read), and figured my immaturity and impatience had made me miss some important underlying themes and developments in The Plague.

But nope, I was totally correct and wish I hadn't just wasted these hours. You can literally read the first 100 pages of this book (maybe less), and the last 20 or so, and you haven't missed a beat.

There are two types of people in The Plague: those that are separated from loved ones, and those that are not. How much time can you spend recreating the exact same descriptions of the emotions of these two groups, which rarely (if ever) changes in a way that isn't painfully obvious or expected.

Seriously, if you DO read this and get past the 100 page mark and start seeing how painfully stagnant this novel is, just know that it continues to the last page (with the exception of the very mild and sloppy cessation of the plague, and the even MORE painfully obvious confession of the source of narration).

Rating:
Summary: One of the great books
Review: This is one of the truly great books. It is by far Camus' best. It opens with the description of Oran and already in the first pages Camus creates a world. The story as it will be told is filled with interesting characters. And it is one of the few novels I can think of that really gives a sense of a collective action and drama of a city perhaps a civilization struggling for its life against the Plague.
Camus story has more than one hero. But the principal one Dr. Rieux in his silent devotion and his consistent effort to resist and stem the plague is the major one. His seeming stoicism combined with his courageous activity seem to define for Camus the ideal human stance in the face of a now indifferent and now cruel universe. Camus in this book is providing a parable of how Mankind struggles with Evil. And the Evil some say he is referring to is the evil of Nazism in the second War. But the Evil too can be seen as a kind of general Terror which recurs and recurs in human experience. The story of the book, and this is one of the most powerful things about the book is dramatic. The struggle against the Plague is the community's collective struggle and we follow it in the action of the novel. Camus traces the Plague by tracing its reactions on different characters, including one who profits by the Plague, who is freed of his criminal exceptionalism by it. There are also lovable minor characters such as the would - be - writer who writes over and over again the sentence of his novel. And there is too the Priest Father Paneloux and his effort to use the language of Theology to deal with the Evil he is seeing day by day. All these characters most notably Rieux in his relation to his second wife go through the Plague together .And the story of how it ends and how a certain relief comes to the city present in a way the triumph of the human efforts and at the same time a kind of proof of how Man is simply a toy in the hands of forces beyond his control. The Plague in any case Camus makes clear is not destroyed forever, but is gone for now , and will recur again sometime in the future as Evil continues to recur in human history.
My brief summary does not in any way do justice to this remarkable and moving work, written with great restraint and beauty.


Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: There are different ways in which this book registers with the reader. The metaphor of the plague did not represent war to me at all when I read the book, but rather other things, like the way societies can become "quarantines" of their own volition, how this particular society had "quarantined" itself long before the plague arrived; the fact that nothing the "authorities" do to deal with the plague really helps, but in fact, in contrast to the plague, are revealed as being empty systems, and who, I think Camus seems to imply, are rather deserving of the plague, not so much because of any outward travesty they have commited, but because merely they have forgotten, neglected something: which is LIFE. They have been suiting themselves up all along to receive the plague; they have tailored themselves to receive nothing else. So what do we expect?

That is a little of what I got from this book. Which is to say that one can get quite a lot from this book. Yet the reason I give it four stars and not five is not so much because of the writing, which does actually seem to lack a substantial middle section, but rather because of Camus's philosophy. His existentialism presupposes things in order to maintain his "heroic despair" (the practise of the doctors in the book and their volunteers), and thus, in a way, ceases to be existential. That of course doesn't negate it altogether; the doctors perpetually pluck away at their work, without trying to figure any "ideal" that would reassure them of what they are doing, other than to keep doing, the doing being their testament as it works itself out, a sort of animal hatred of the plague simply because it is a plague; and that is their stamp of life. This is great, but it is not all. His "heroic despair", while definitely admirable, is not truly existential after itself, and does not completely satisfy by itself. It does not end there.