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The Plague
  
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The Plague (Hardcover)

by Albert Camus (Author) "The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194-at Oran ..." (more)
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (103 customer reviews)

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The Nobel prize-winning Albert Camus, who died in 1960, could not have known how grimly current his existentialist novel of epidemic and death would remain. Set in Algeria, in northern Africa, The Plague is a powerful study of human life and its meaning in the face of a deadly virus that sweeps dispassionately through the city, taking a vast percentage of the population with it. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.


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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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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103 Reviews
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4.4 out of 5 stars (103 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5.0 out of 5 stars "A town thrown back upon itself", Nov 14 2008
By Linda Bulger (Avon, Maine) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Plague (Paperback)

In the 21st century we expect to control and conquer disease. How can we imagine the horror of "The Plague?" Albert Camus gave us a chilling story, set in the Algerian city of Oran. First the rats bleed and die, and then people begin to fall sick with the dreaded bubonic plague. As the weekly death toll rises, officials seal off the city and the long exile begins.

The hospitals fill up and public buildings are requisitioned for makeshift plague wards. Quarantine camps are established. The usual burial arrangements are inadequate so the corpses are eventually interred in communal graves without the presence of mourners.

The narrator is unnamed until the end. The central character is Dr. Rieux who goes about his rounds of caring and organizing, somehow able to carry on in the absurd atmosphere of death, exile, deprivation and bereavement. "There lay certitude, there in the daily round...The thing was to do your job as it should be done."

The other characters find their own way of carrying on -- the civil servant in pursuit of the perfect opening sentence for his book, the priest preaching God's flail of retribution, the journalist on assignment when the city is was sealed and now frantic to escape to his wife, the fearful criminal living for the first time in a community of fear, the vacationer sharing his passion for collective responsibility with Dr. Rieux one starry night.

Of course The Plague is about an epidemic only on its most superficial level. Camus, Algerian-born himself, was a committed anti-totalitarian fresh from the French Resistance in 1947 when THE PLAGUE was published. His characters act out his personal philosophy in the absurdist 1940s world: they keep doing the right thing while believing that it won't make a difference, while knowing that to do anything else is to be complicit in the wickedness of the world. The book is easy to read but much more challenging to think about, which makes a good case for the reading.

Linda Bulger, 2008
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4.0 out of 5 stars Decisions..., Jan 10 2007
By Alcat Garcia "aka bel_78 // A.G. is just an a... (Buenos Aires, Argentina) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Plague (Paperback)
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
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5.0 out of 5 stars "Hats off!" to Camus!, Jul 9 2004
This review is from: The Plague (Paperback)
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!

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 		 Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The Timeless Metaphor: The Human Condition under siege
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... Read more
Published on Jun 14 2004 by Ann Ilton

5.0 out of 5 stars The Plague
In 194-, an illness begins to form in the ordinary town of Oran. At first rats in their thousands die and strange occurrences begin, but the doctors and learned men shy from... Read more
Published on Jun 5 2004 by Damian Kelleher

4.0 out of 5 stars THOUGHTFUL TAPESTRY OF THE COMPLEXITY OF WAR AND COURAGE..
My first read of this book a few years ago had left me with the impression that it made for a sordid case of existential disenchantment. Read more
Published on May 25 2004 by Shashank Tripathi

5.0 out of 5 stars Life in Death
Camus' THE PLAGUE should make it obvious that Camus was a writer first and an existentialist a very distant second. Read more
Published on May 20 2004 by Rocco Dormarunno

4.0 out of 5 stars Disaster and the human spirit
This is a a magnificent novel from a wise, understanding and compassive writer. The story is simple: the city of Oran is stricken by a terrible (and metaphorical) plague spreaded... Read more
Published on Feb 19 2004 by Guillermo Maynez

5.0 out of 5 stars The lost battle for our own minds and spirits
40 years ago Camus was all the rage.

The forgotten student union coffee shop and Greenwich Village Expresso debates of the first half of the 60s weren't all over Communism,... Read more

Published on Dec 15 2003 by Jack Purcell

5.0 out of 5 stars An Immortal Masterpiece
The suggestion that Camus's classic is as timely as it is timeless is not an expression to be taken glibly. Read more
Published on Nov 10 2003 by Jayant Kairam

3.0 out of 5 stars Has Character Issues
The story that Albert Camus wrote is wonderful. It shows what happens when a society is under stress of a uncontrolled medical disaster. Read more
Published on Sep 17 2003 by Woofboy

5.0 out of 5 stars The trauma of a postwar existence
In "The Plague," Camus updates a medieval horror to the twentieth century to introduce a new concept to his main literary theme of man faced with the absurd. Read more
Published on Aug 29 2003 by A.J.

4.0 out of 5 stars A Superb Novel on Two Levels
Although the Plague is not my favorite Camus, that honor belongs to The Stranger and The Rebel, it is nonetheless a great allegory for the grinding nature of life under occupation... Read more
Published on Aug 19 2003 by Mike Kilianski

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