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The Plague

Book Description
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.

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The New York Times Book Review, Stephen Spender
The message is not the highest form of creative art, but it may be of such importance for our time that to dismiss it in the name of artistic criticism would be to blaspheme against the human spirit.

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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 by rats. As soon as it is universally acknowledged, the inhabitants start trying to survive, both physically and emotionally. But each one does it their way, often hanging on to the past which is all they have left in the face of the hideous present and the very uncertain future.

The main character is Dr. Rieux, who takes charge of organizing the medical response. He is helped by a curious and moving character, Grand, a man who is trying to write a novel but gets stuck rewriting forever the first sentence, always remembering a lost love and growing to be resigned to his future. There is Cottard, who enjoys the odd situation created by the plague, after trying to kill himself: it seems the plague has given him something meaningful to live for. And Rambert, the foreign journalist who tries time and again to escape the city, only to be deterred by his conscience. The female presence is notoriously scarce. The tone is apparently cold and distant, but it is written with a mastery which gives us a glimpse of the humanity of the author. It's hard and real, and the human spirit in the face of such a disaster shines through.

Interestingly enough, this novel seems to contradict Camus's manifested existentialism, such as the one portrayed in "The Stranger". Strange that an existentialist would write a novel where he seems very clearly to send the message that life exists and is important, that it has a meaning, even if obscure for us mortals, but that somehow it is valuable and deserves to be preserved even by sacrifice. Camus seems to have grown up by the time he wrote this great parable. --Reviewer: Guillermo Maynez from Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico