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The Plague (Essential Penguin) | 
| Author: Albert Camus
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
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Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 86030
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 4.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0140278516
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780140278514
Publication Date: September 3, 1998
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 An allegorical tale of aching compassion for the human condition March 27, 2009
Trevor Coote (Papeete, Tahiti, French Polynesia)
Albert Camus's allegorical tale of a community cut off from the outside world is a work of aching compassion for the human condition. The small Algerian town of Oran is overwhelmed by a catastrophic outbreak of bubonic plague which forces the authorities to isolate and quarantine its population. As the death toll rises, doctor and humanitarian Bernard Rieux, together with volunteers, does his best for the cause of human life within the limits of modern medicine.
This is a story about human beings under siege where death threatens all equally, about their reactions and their different means of dealing with isolation from friends, family and love, of maintaining daily routine in the face of constant, debilitating fear. How do people react under trauma? Why do some individuals grasp for dear life at the piece of driftwood in the ocean after their boat has capsized while others let go meekly straight away and drift into oblivion? In The Plague we see all; those who cope and those who don't, those who sacrifice and those who exploit. It is an existential tale of humanity in all its diversity and demonstrates why social justice can never be realised in a Godless world wracked by arbitrary biological injustice.
Written just after the end of Nazi occupation of France The Plague can be read as an allegory of that occupation but equally of the Holocaust or the Siege of Leningrad. Beautiful, powerful and profoundly moving, this is European literature on a different level.
 Dull February 3, 2008
Ibrahim Ali (London)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Despite a promising start the book runs out of steam after 100 pages and spends the next 200 pages going in circles. There's nothing too insightful here and it's almost unbelievable that this was the same author that wrote the outsider.
 Absurdist classic January 17, 2006
Depressaholic (London, UK)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
Camus’ ‘The Plague’ is one of his definitive absurdist statements, simply stated and beautifully constructed. The main question of Camus’ philosophy was, in an atheistic world, in which there is no afterlife, can there be any sensible way of deciding how to live our lives, knowing all the while that they will inevitably end in death? Central to this is an awareness of the proximity of death. It is this idea that ‘The Plague’ plays with so brilliantly. At the time of publication, Europe was just emerging from WWII, and France from Nazi occupation, both of which had brought the reality of death much closer.
‘The Plague’ is set on the town of Oran, Algeria. The first signs of plague are when the rats emerge onto the streets and begin dying in large numbers. Throughout the book, the threat of plague becomes more real, starting as a mere idea, then as an ignorable threat, then a pandemic which eventually causes a state of emergency and finally as an enemy to be battled. Through this device, Camus’ is able to examine the behaviour of the townspeople as the threat of death becomes ever closer. In particular, he focuses on a small group of men and their interaction with the plague. There is the doctor fighting the plague (Rieux), the gangster on the run who welcomes it (Cottard), the priest (Paneloux), the reformed terrorist (Tarrou), among others, All of which serve to illustrate the variety of human responses to death.
‘The Plague’ is, for me, one of three great Absurdist works by Camus (‘The Outsider’ and ‘Exile and the Kingdom’ being the others). Of the three it is probably my least favourite, because Camus’ dry prose doesn’t especially lend itself to longer books. Nevertheless, it is a classic work of philosophy rendered into literature. It makes its point clearly and plainly, without preaching or feeling the need to illustrate its point with long monologues. A great book and a definitive twentieth century work.
Decisions... February 21, 2005
Bel Alcat (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
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...
Fascinating novel January 3, 2005
M. D. Marikar
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
Apparently, it is an allegory of the German occupation of France in WWII, but I read it as an account of what life is like as a human being dealing with a catastrophe like plague - how do you deal with continuous death, the same thing over and over again, and keep your humanity?
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