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Summary: Changed Perspectives from Imminent Death
Review: The Plague is about love, exile, and suffering as illuminated by living around death. What is the meaning of life? For many, that question is an abstraction except in the context of being aware of losing some of the joys of life, or life itself. In The Plague, Camus creates a timeless tale of humans caught in the jaws of implacable death, in this case a huge outbreak of bubonic plague in Oran, Algeria on the north African coast. With the possibility of dying so close, each character comes to see his or her life differently. In a sense, we each get a glimpse of what we, too, may think about life in the last hours and days before our own deaths. The Plague will leave you with a sense of death as real rather than as an abstraction. Then by reflecting in the mirror of that death, you can see life more clearly. For example, what role would you take if bubonic plague were to be unleashed in your community? Would you flee? Would you help relieve the suffering? Would you become a profiteer? Would you help maintain order? Would you withdraw or seek out others? These are all important questions for helping you understand yourself that this powerful novel will raise for you. The book is described as objectively as possible by a narrator, who is one of the key figures in the drama. That literary device allows each of us to insert ourselves into the situation. Let me explain the main themes. Love is expressed in many ways. There is the love of men and women for each other. Dr. Rieux's wife is ill, and has just left for treatment at a sanitarium. Rambert, a journalist on temporary assignment, is separated from his live-in girl friend in Paris. Dr. Rieux's mother comes to stay with him during his mother's absence, so there is also love of parent and child. The magistrate also loses his son to the plague after a desperate battle. Separations occur because of the quarantine on Oran, which causes love to be tested. What is love without the other person being present? The characters find that their memories soon become abstractions. But they reach out to establish new love with each other. Tarrou, who is also caught in Oran, decides or organize a volunteer corps to help with the sick and dead. Rambert decides to stay in Oran to help after having arranged to escape the quarantine. The survivors find succor in increasing closeness with each other. Rieux and Tarrou become close, almost like brothers. Even Rieux's patients become people with whom he develops an emotional bond, even though the waves of death become an abstraction as he can do little to avert them. The priest figure also helps to explore the notion of love for God and God's love for us. The exile theme is reinforced by the quarantine. People cannot leave Oran. The disease itself causes that exile to become worse. If someone in your household becomes ill, each well person has to be quarantined. So you may be living in a tent in the soccer stadium wondering what is happening to the rest of your family. Cottard is a criminal who is on the run from the authorities. He is in despair as the plague begins, and tries to kill himself. The distractions of the plague keep the authorities from troubling him, so the period of the plague is an exile from his criminal past. Suffering is easy to explain. Bubonic plague came in two forms in the book. Both brought painful and rapid death, with few reprieves. There is high fever, painful swelling or difficulty in breathing, and enormous pain. Those who tend the suffering also suffer, from the enormous workloads, the sense of futility, and the fear that they, too, will be next. Camus does a nice job of pointing out that these themes also recur in everyday life. We just don't see them very clearly. The people in Oran live in an ugly city that deliberately built itself away from the beauty of the ocean on a sun-scorched plateau plagued by winds. They take little time to enjoy each other or the ocean, because they are caught up with making money. Commerce is their passion. So they cut themselves off from love, in an exile of spirit, which causes them to shrivel and suffer emotionally even before the plague comes. Tarrou also describes is own sense of the plague in everyday life when he discovers that his father is a prosecuting attorney who helps bring criminals to the justice of a firing squad. Even that faint connection of not trying to stop the legal killing causes Tarrou to feel like he carries the plague within him. The book is masterful in its use of metaphor. In the beginning, dying rats and small animals presage the plague attacking humans. At the end, their return presages the return of normal life to Oran. The scenes alternate between illuminating the main themes in the context of the physical plague and the emotional plague. Religion is used as a bridge between the two, raising the fundamental question about what God's purpose is in unleashing the plague. The priest is fully tested in his love of God through this development, which is one of the most moving parts of the book. I have read the book both in French and in English, and found this translation to be a perfectly appropriate one. There are few nuances that you will miss by reading this in English. Obviously, if you read French well, you should read the book in its original form. This book is an excellent example of why Albert Camus was named a Novel Laureate in Literature. After you read this great novel, I encourage you to consider the subject of complacency. That's the author's ultimate target. Where are you complacent in ways that cost you love, closeness with others, and happiness? What else is complacency costing you? How can you help others learn to overcome complacency in loving, happy ways without the spectre of death to help you? Enjoy a more wonderful life by refocusing on what is most important!
Rating: 
Summary: Heartfelt and moving, but a little one-sided.
Review: I'll most likely get kicked in the teeth for disagreeing with a famous literary philosopher like Camus, but after reading The Plague, I really feel it fell short of proving what it meant to illustrate, "that there are more things to admire in men than to despise." This is my third Camus story (The Fall and The Stranger being the first two), and while I like his style, I felt that The Plague strove too hard to be optimistic about humanity. So much so, in fact, that he was rather selective with what human aspects were covered. The main characters that the narrator follows are interestingly unique as individuals, and are worth reading the book for. However, in striving to prove that people are better than they are worse, he eagerly uses the individuals as template examples of how good people can strive to be at heart, while at the same time glossing over the negatives taking place in the background. The corruption, profiteering, and class separatism that take place in the quarantined town are mentioned and briefly described, but never examined as the inherent evil or indifference that are the true plague of man. A great story worth reading (and interesting views on how people chose to live and dedicate their lives), and excellent characters, but in the long run the characters are not examples of human nature, but rather exceptions to the rule.
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Summary: truly human
Review: ...read it... learn... read it again... if there'll be something that'll haunt me later on in life, it may be that i have not read it again, and have never really learned.
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Summary: The Plague is a Brilliant Nazi Allegory
Review: I won't add to the many, many very positive reviews on this list, with whose praises I agree. Rather, I wanted to point out that surprisingly none of the reviews seems to catch the book's plainly allegorical nature. "The Plague" was written by a star of the WWII French resistance and, according to his biographer Herbert Lottman, he first began sketching the novel out during the Nazi occupation of France (during which time he was a newspaper editor living variously in Paris and the south of France, as well as an executive at a leading French publisher and secretly an editor of a leading resistance newspaper). The bubonic plague, as it appears in the novel, is fairly obviously a symbol for Nazi ideology. Like a disease, that ideology invaded and infected many in occupied France. The resistance fighters of that time were thus like heroic doctors battling the disease, and "The Plague" is a chronicle of the moral nature of that fight as seen through the subtle lens of Camus' own moral conception. Camus himself admitted as much in an important essay he published after "The Plague," written in defense of his novel. Understanding this allegory helps explain that "The Plauge" is at once a work of political philosophy and a further gloss on the moral dilemma first directly faced by Camus in "The Myth of Sisyphus," "The Stranger," and his early play "The Misunderstanding." It is useful, incidentally, to read "The Plague" in connection with Camus' philosophical work "The Rebel" and his play "The Just"; Camus himself saw the three works as an interrelated "triptych" (so says Lottman). Again, understanding this novel's allegorical nature helps explain the relation between the three works.
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Summary: Nice writing, but what's the point?
Review: Slow moving, but very lucid writing. In the end, the book seemed more like filler material than anything else. It's part cronicle, part philosophy, part religious discussion w/o a strong message.
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Summary: The Plague of Life
Review: The Plague is an example of great existentialist writing. AT time the novel is slow moving, with very little development. But it is overall pretty decent.
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Summary: Boring, trivial and disappointing
Review: This book is a real disappointment after reading "The Stranger". It is effectively a journal-like chronicle on devastation the plague caused to a town. There is not much more to it. Characters are dull and uninteresting unlike those in "The Stranger". There is not much of a plot apart from chronicling the plague progression and some booring people it is killing. Two lessons I learned from reading it: don't catch the plague and don't read this book.
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Summary: Naked Morality
Review: Camus' The Plague is at once disturbing in detail and beautiful in content. Camus strips away the self-righteous facades of contrived morality and displays its true character: idiosyncratic, open, nonpresumptuous nakedness. As we read The Plague, we follow the struggles of a doctor who is tasked to heal the unhealable. The reasons he gives, as well as the reasons that all characters give, for his quiet heroism are simple, and by virtue of its simplicity, reaffirms the difficulty we all face in making moral decisions. Sad, inspiring, disturbing, and subtle, The Plague is the story of humankind naked, groping its way through human tragedy. And in the valiant attempt to save the townspeople, Camus essentially saves us all.
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Summary: The Plague by Albert Camus
Review: the book was boring because it was the same thing through out the whole book. its just about people dying from a plague. dont read it.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Novel
Review: This is a very fine novel that explores the effect of suffering on human beings. It is both philosophical and plot-driven (to a degree). A very insightful book that, if it doesn't exactly shove optimism and hope down the readers throat, at least leaves the door open for the reader to choose to be optimistic if he or she chooses. "There are more things to admire in humans than to despise." (Or something like that.)
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