The Plague

Rating:
Summary: Not his best but what got him the Nobel Prize
Review: Cunning allusion to the plague of the Nazi's, this is an entertaining text. It's only downfall is that Camus drags the idea out way too long. After THE STRANGER, head here. A must read for Camusians.

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Summary: Love, Exile, and Suffering Illuminated by Life Around Death
Review: 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 overcoming the plague of complacency about the most important human values and activities!

Rating:
Summary: This is my favorite Camus novel
Review: I have read all of Camus' novels printed in English that are still available, and of all of them, this is my absolute favorite. It is incredibly interesting, and I could not put it down. He describes everything so well in this novel, from the buboes and swollen ganglion on the afflicted to the deteriorating setting of the novel, Oran. If you are taking a class on Camus or existentialist thought and want to prepare yourself ahead of time with a book that won't make you want to stop reading, I recommend this one with no reservations.

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Summary: Healing Amidst Death
Review: "The town itself, let us admit, is ugly." So says Dr. Bernard Rieux, the narrator of Albert Camus', The Plague.

The Plague takes place in Oran, a small Mediterranean town in North Africa. Not only does Dr. Rieux find Oran ugly, he find its inhabitants boring people with little involvement in the actual business of living.

One day, Rieux steps on a dead rat, then another and another. Soon, he sees them everywhere, littered among the bloated corpses of Oran's inhabitants. Rieux and the Oranians ignore the problem at first, blaming the sanitation bureau for neglecting its duties. However, they soon discover that the dead and dying have a far more sinister tale to tell.

Although Rieux is the narrator of The Plague, several other main characters do exist. Jean Tarrou is a hapless man who has the misfortune of wandering into Oran during the plague. He quickly becomes a friend of Rieux's and his chronicles of Oran's ordeal appear throughout the book. Raymon Rambert is a French journalist who simply ends up in Oran during the time of the plague. Although longing to return to his beautiful wife in Paris, Rambert is forced to remain in Oran. Jospeh Grand is a writer eking out an existence in Oran as he attempts to write the perfect book, while Cottard is a prisoner who is using Oran to hide from the officials who want to execute him.

Oran is quarantined and its citizens must find various ways of dealing with this catastrophe. Some simply accept the inevitable and wait for the disease to strike while others turn a blind eye in the hope that if they do not see the plague, the plague will not see them.

One problem, however, affects all of the town's inhabitants--money. For the first time, Oran's port is closed. They cannot buy nor can they sell. They struggle to survive on their own with little fresh food and basic medical supplies. Only Cottard is happy, because while Oran is under quarantine, Cottard can consider his dismal life spared.

As the situation in Oran worsens, and little can be done, Father Paneloux, the town's priest, tells its inhabitants that the plague has come to punish the sinners of Oran and further tells his congregation that the plague will cease upon the town's repentance of its sins.

After a long and forceful sermon by Paneloux, the town does, indeed, change. Grand begins to have problems writing even one sentence containing a conjunction. He trembles, mutters, gulps and exhibits other qualities of a man on the edge. Rambert attempts to escape to France, first legally, then, when that fails, illegally. The two men finally calm themselves and join Rieux and Tarrou in their dedication to overcoming the plague. Paneloux, himself, finally joins in these efforts. Strangely, the plague, which has come to kill, has served in uniting men of different beliefs and visions in one life-affirming quest.

Once Oran becomes united, the plague begins to level off. Another victim dies, however. Father Paneloux becomes ill after witnessing the slow and agonizing death of Jacques Othon, a young, innocent boy. Chastised, Paneloux retracts his earlier, sophomoric message and decides that the plague is part of a plan that must be accepted.

As the survivors celebrate, the plague claims one last victim, the man who was its greatest enemy. While this man's life is gone, the others who have battled the plague find their lives forever changed.

The very first chapter of The Plague is short but filled with immense foreshadowing and extensive descriptive passages.

We find it easy to see why Oran becomes such an easy target for death and disease. Oran is not only ugly and ordinary, it is built so that its back is turned to the sea. In fact, the changing seasons in Oran, says Rieux, must be discriminated in the sky, for the town is an unrelieved monotony of grayness and its inhabitants are already living on the fringes of life.

Ignoring the simple pleasures of life, Oranians are nevertheless hard workers, but ones for whom money has no meaning beyond its mere possession. Love, too, is foreign to the citizens of Oran. They marry and have children but the concept of love for love's sake is unknown to them. Their very inauthenticity and narrow views make them prime targets for the plague and when confronted with it, they have precious few resources for dealing with the calamities it presents.

The greatest piece of foreshadowing, however, and the one that sets the book's theme is the sense of alienation and entrapment. Both the living and the dead remain trapped behind the walls of Oran. Freedom, truth and beauty all lie within a stone's throw, but, until the plague forces them to look, the Oranians remain blind to the beauties of the world outside.

The message of Oran is as clear as the sea that sparkles within reach of its walls. Beauty and truth are always ours for the taking. If we choose, however, to turn our backs on the riches that are ours, disease and death await us and only the luckiest among us will survive.

Rating:
Summary: A Stunning Acheivement of Existential Genius
Review: This masterful work portrays with elegant simplicity the existential condition of man. Suitable for readers who have never read an existential Camus novel or for experts in metaphysics, this book is a must for any person who has ever wondered about the condition of man. Camus derserved his nobel prize just for this book alone. This novel is the apex of camus' writings in this readers opinion and provides clear insights to every reader. Buy this book!

Rating:
Summary: Good art; one-dimensional philosophy.
Review: There are more things in heaven and in earth than dreamt of in Camus' philsophy; but it is a lucid dream, as far as it goes. The story takes place in a drab town in North Africa. There is something dreary also about the narrator, who does not so much deny his heroism, as despise it. (Like an alter-ego of the narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, who despises his villainy.) One does not notice flowers or taste food much in Oran, and one gets the feeling that the buildings are gray. One wonders if Camus knows any other kind of town, or any other kind of life. The book is almost as dreary as 1984, and without the meadow where Orwell's lovers found pleasure. But perhaps that is part of what makes it a great mood piece.

The novel's main weakness is philosophical. It seems to me that good philosophy, if not art, having assigned itself so sweeping a theme as the meaning of suffering, will try to represent positions it attacks truthfully. Solzhenitsyn understands his Marxists, and Dostoevsky his atheists. It seems to me this is one place Camus falls short. I found something bizarre in the attack Camus waged against what he seemed to think was the Christian idea of suffering. "There are more things to admire in men than to despise," he argued. "Everyone is more or less sick of the plague." "Until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture." What is bizarre is that Camus seems to think he is attacking Christianity here. Actually, he is echoing some of the truths it has taught Western culture: man made in the image of God, original sin that one might call a sickness, the call of the prophets to rescue the downtrodden.

Camus' priest, who says that the townspeople should not fight the disease, is at best one of the straight men out of the book of Job, at worst a heretic. The skeptical doctor, on the other hand, is a figure of Christ in one dimension. Like Rieux, Christians have always "fought against creation as we found it," because we follow a man who risked his life to heal. Like Rieux, Jesus was not too heroic to show fear or doubt, and also came to a moment of alienation from God. In fact, some say the Gospel first caught on largely because Christians were the only people in the Roman Empire willing to nurse the sick during plagues. By contrast, French existentialists come late to the healing profession.

The question that never seems to occur to anyone in this book, or in the reviews below, is, could the state of having no illusions Camus recommends be the biggest self-delusion of all? Considering my own life and those of people I know, the Gospels are more realistic than the Plague, precisely because in them, tones of black and gray fit into a larger pattern that includes more cheerful colors as well. Miracles, the Ressurection, and the reality of a God who answers prayer, are in my opinion truths that must be faced by any person who wants to construct a complete picture of reality. (Not to mention meadows with flowers, children opening presents at Christmas, the sound of cicattas after rain.) Camus limits himself both by artistic design, and by materialistic dogma, to show life from a certain, narrow angle, and does it well. But it would be a terrible mistake to impose that view on all of reality, as Camus invites his readers to do. Camus does not add to orthodoxy, but subtracts from it -- and from life.

Camus discovered death, and depicts it well. If he had discovered life, he would have been a more complete philosopher; but perhaps he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize for literature. Read this excellent book, and let its truths sink into your soul. Then reach for Chesterton, Dickens, or Wu Cheng En -- or even Solzhenitsyn, who went through worse hells than a plague and came out more cheerful -- and see what Camus missed. Better yet, read the Gospels, and see more of it.

One minor complaint on the artistic side. How is it that Rieux's friends felt free to drop in on him at all hours during the height of a plague? Considering the doctors I know, this seems to me almost as big a miracle as if he'd laid hands on them and they jumped out of their beds and went home. Author, Jesus and the Religions of Man [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: human grace under tragic pressure
Review: May be Camus's finest novel, displaying as it does both the best and the worst of human nature. "The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man with the fewest lapses of attention." Yes!

Rating:
Summary: hope vs. despair in the face of Man's weaknesses
Review: The Plague, set i

Rating:
Summary: One of the best works of the twentieth century
Review: I've read this book twice now, and each time it seems richer and more relevant to life in the modern world. It has something to say about disease, about world war two, and even about what it means to be human.

The different characters of the novel are fascinating, and their situations stick with the reader long after you conclude reading. Perhaps the most shocking scene, the death of a child in the middle of the novel leaves a big impression. This event itself almost sums up Camus's views of human nature and the random, meaningless nature of existence.

This is a classic and a great read. It will make you think about "big issues" for a very, very long time.

Rating:
Summary: Read it as an allegory
Review: For potential readers and previous reviewers who are reading this book literally (i.e., as about a real plague), try instead reading it as an allegory. An allegory is something that can be read on various levels. As such, it can have more than one meaning: a surface meaning and a deeper meaning.

The surface meaning is about a plague, but remember where and when Camus lived. Perhaps Camus is trying to say something about living in Nazi occupied France. Maybe the plague acts as a symbol for the Nazis. See if reading the book this way changes your opinion or deepens your appreciation.