If you lived in an ordinary community quite unexpectedly facing an existential stress test, what would you do? How would you deal with the situation, and which character traits of yours would all of a sudden come to the surface? How would you treat your friends, neighbours and fellow citizens? What would you do to change the situation? These questions have been haunting me ever since I first read La Peste in school, over two decades ago. I have reread it since then, with the same fascination, and with growing compassion and understanding for the less heroic characters and their fears and petty actions. To me, it is a masterpiece, one of the great examples of timeless world literature. As a student, even though I was worrying just as much about exam questions, French vocabulary and grammatical difficulties as about the message, I felt that I finally grasped the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, and their strange morbid attraction despite (or because of) their absolute negativity. I asked myself to what extent I would have remained human facing the terror of the rats and their invisible, yet deadly load.One thing, though, remained completely unthinkable to me as a young adolescent, despite the horror of the reading experience, and the sincere sympathy for the generations of Europeans that had experienced societies worse than plague-ridden. I thought it COULD NOT happen again. Not here, not in Western civilisation, not with our KNOWLEDGE! Being an adolescent in Germany in the mid-1990s, I was convinced that walls were breaking down, that democracy was on the rise, that human rights and welfare were secure goods, and that the world was beyond the plague of totalitarian, all-consuming ideas spreading like wildfire - like a plague befalling a whole community. Cest impossible, tout le monde sait quelle a disparu de lOccident.In a way, I was in the situation of doctor Rieux at the very beginning of the story, convinced that the plague was completely gone. But Rieux, narrator and participant in the story, documenting his own private worries along with the catastrophe of the spreading plague, has to choose between sticking to his ideas or to accept the evidence he witnesses. Chronicling the development of his community in crisis, as well as actively working to help those stricken with the plague, he slowly but steadily grows as a human being and realises that nothing is actually ever GONE!Even in the end, when people are celebrating their survival of the epidemic, in drunken happiness forgetting all their losses, their suffering, their fears and pain, he stays vigilant. For he has learned something beyond the lesson of the immediate crisis:Écoutant, en effet, les cris dallégresse qui montaient de la ville, Rieux se souvenait que cette allégresse était toujours menacée. Car il savait ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et quon peut lire dans les livres, que le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparaît jamais, quil peut rester pendant des dizaines dannées endormi dans les meubles et le linge, quil attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et que, peut-être, le jour viendrait où, pour le malheur et lenseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse.What would you do if you saw those rats? Who would you choose to be? It is time to dig out the masterpieces of existential questions again, I think. Knowledge of the different facets of human nature under stress can never be overestimated as a means to choose wisely, should your town be stricken unexpectedly by a plague. I wish I knew for sure I would make a decent appearance in Camus scenario. But fear is powerful!

Reread.

Second reading. This is an essential book. If there's a canon, The Plague belongs in it. A few things interested me this time through. Mostly the narrator's penchant, most effective, for writing about the town's collective mood. This device struck me as an improvement on the Soviet worker novels of the day (1947). The prose is not pumped up to triumphalist proportions. (There must be a scholar somewhere who's addresses this. I'll have to search LC.) Neither is there an idealized superman worker, but portraits of individuals with both flaws and great strengths. One wonders to what extent the novel had didactic intent. By that observation I don't mean to trivialize the book's elegant high style, its sheer brilliance, its profound insights into life, death and duty. This is an astonishing book and I highly recommended it.PS A new translation of Exile and the Kingdom appeared in 2007. Can a new translation of The Plague be far off? Let's hope not. This one was published in 1948!

I read The Plague right after reading Swanns Way. Of course it wasnt a deliberate move. But as I moved on, I realized that reading of The Plague had rendered something quite remarkable in the way I realized and appreciated both works. Both works embody a reality. Swanns Way speaks of the reality that is long gone by and one wish to remember and cherish, whereas, The Plague makes one more acutely aware of the bleakness of actual reality when imposed through an epidemic such as plague. This book speaks of the things that are, rather than things that were. Swanns way had left me completely mesmerized, longing for the bygones. But The Plague left me assessing the actual approach which governs human beings when faced with discomforts in life.The first thing that strikes in the work is the avoidance of acceptance of pestilence on the part of people of the town of Oran. Albert says, Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us. There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. He further adds that because pestilence doesnt have human dimensions, people refuse to believe it, thinking of it as a bad dream which would end soon. Perhaps people do not wish to accept its onset, for the reason that they have far greater faith in life itself. But when they have to, it results in utter misery on their part. The beauty of the work lies in the depiction of different approaches adopted by different individuals during plague. Whereas some people engage in serving the disease ridden, some try to make more money by smuggling liquor and other desired goods. Some people are melancholic, whereas some try to find happiness in between. What I found further intriguing, were the words Camus employed to express the thoughts conveyed by the Priest, as regarding religion and God during Plague. Consider these two addresses delivered by Father Paneloux; one, at the beginning of the epidemic and the other, after months of suffering.First one starts as:My brethren, a calamity has befallen you; my brethren, you have deserved itSince the beginning of history, the scourge of God has brought down the proud and the blind beneath His feet. Think of this and fall on your knees.Second one ends as:My brethren, the love of God is a difficult love. It assumes a total abandonment of oneself and contempt for ones person. But it alone can wipe away the suffering and death of children, it alone makes them necessary because it is impossible to understand such things, so we have no alternative except to desire them. This is the faith- cruel in the eyes of man, decisive in the eyes of God-which we must try to reach. We must try to make ourselves equal to this awful imageIn the first address, the Priest is so certain about the ways of God, but the second address clearly depicts the vagueness, as the consequence of severe sufferings due to pestilence. How little does religion/God matters when humanity faces such pandemic! Camus has skilfully captured the inner tumult which the Priest went through while coming to terms with the harsh reality. The reading was quite overpowering. It was further augmented by the reference to Bois de Boulogne at some places during the narration. Grand, an aid to Rieux, read the first line of his writing to Rieux. What was beautiful was the effect it created, producing in mind the consequence of anxiety and the desperation to escape.Rieux was listening at the same time to a sort of vague humming sound in the town, as if replying to the whistling flail of the Plague. At this particular moment he had an extraordinary acute perception of the town spread out at his feet, the enclosed world that it formed and the dreadful cries stifled in its night. He heard Grands muffled voice: On a fine morning in the month of May, an elegant woman was riding a magnificent sorrel mare through the flowered avenues of the Bois de BoulogneI think that Camus, who is touted as an absurdist for his writings on the subject, has very profoundly articulated the idea of absurd through this writing as well. The idea that he presented in The Myth of Sisyphus, that of the need to seek clarity and meaning within a world which offers neither, has been expressed in these lines for me.All that a man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory. Perhaps that was what Tarrou called winning the game!...But if that is what it meant to win the game, how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, and deprived of what one hopes.

*The second paragraph contains spoilers, I'd steer clear of it if you haven't read the novel*The Plague is a depressing novel about the bubonic plague. Well, that's the main gist of it, but it's mostly about how the people dealt with such unexpected horror. At first I was painfully stricken at how lifeless and boring the characters are, but the last chapter changed my perception of the novel. They are lifeless because the narrator is speaking based on his observations. He can't account for what the others are feeling, so he can only describe what he can see. He himself is part of this plague-driven city, so he tries to express how the others felt by expressing his own grief and sadness. I honestly hate novels that are not character driven, and honestly this novel should be no different, but the plot made up for it. It's thought provoking and full of allegories, symbolisms, and speculations. It's funny how the people who got quarantined chose to live their lives the dullest way that they could possibly do. They are merely surviving, and not living their lives. The worst way to live your life is to live it without knowing your true purpose and happiness. I know the plague was a devastating and life changing event, but it's how you learn to live with the consequences that counts. You can't dwell on the negatives and expect things to get better. Without the motivation to find a cure, the mere seclusion of the people would not have sufficed. Sooner or later there would be cases outside of the quarantined area, and without people trying to find a cure, it would mean total eradication. The Plague teaches you that in every devastating situation, there will always be a way out of it. The last paragraph of the book completely makes my opinion invalid, but only if you are to take in the literal sense. The author states that the Bacillus (etiological agent of the bubonic plague), hasn't been completely eradicated and would surface again in the future. He implies that past mistakes shouldn't be repeated. People now know how to stop the sickness from progressing, so what happened in the past shouldn't happen again in the future. Ignorance is one way to get yourself killed, and only you can fix that problem.I've read numerous reviews tackling on different ideas that this novel tries to portray, and I agree with most of them. I'm a bit of a beginner when it comes to classics and speculative fiction, but I'm vastly interested to explore more of the genre. My idea/s might be incorrect, I understand that, but hopefully no one would try to belittle me in the comments section. Let's try to discuss ideas like adults in the comments section. It's always fun to educate other people, but in the right manner. Don't be an ignorant asshole who thinks that all his ideas are correct and cannot be changed.This novel is only a few pages more than 300, but it took me 12 days to finish this. It's dense and doesn't really have a fast pace to it. Don't get me wrong though, I enjoyed this novel a lot despite some dull parts here and there. I'm just busy with life, and haven't really set my priorities straight, thus resulting to slower reading. 4/5 stars. One of the most thought provoking novels I've read. I've yet to analyze much more about the plot, but it's 4 am and I'm feeling a bit sleepy. It's fun to talk about and analyze classics because they have substance. It's not just a novel to entertain, but it's also to educate and inspire. I can't wait to read more of Camus' works. Such a great author discovered, and I highly recommend this novel.