A gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.
Editorial Reviews
“[Camus] believed that the actual historical incidents we call plagues are merely concentrations of a universal precondition, dramatic instances of a perpetual rule: that all human beings are vulnerable to being randomly exterminated at any time, by a virus, an accident or the actions of our fellow man...He speaks to us in our own times not because he was a magical seer who could intimate what the best epidemiologists could not, but because he correctly sized up human nature.” —Alain de Botton, The New York Times (“Camus on the Coronavirus”)
“Its relevance lashes you across the face . . . At first, the epidemic, like all catastrophes, secretly confirms what everyone knew already; that is, it extends the narcissism of the times into the new era, often via the forbidden hope — that it will smite one’s enemies while sparing oneself . . . Eventually, the town lapses into a kind of collective despondency with one predictable exception: the enduring complacency of ‘a privileged few, those with money to burn.’” —Stephen Metcalf, The Los Angeles Times (“Albert Camus’ The Plague and our own Great Reset”)
“The microbe has no meaning; we seek to create one in the chaos it brings...The plague, as Camus insisted, exposes existing fractures in societies, in class structure and individual character; under stress, we see who we really are.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker (“The Coronavirus Crisis Reveals New York at Its Best and Worst”)
About the Author
Born in Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus published The Stranger—now one of the most widely read novels of this century—in 1942. Celebrated in intellectual circles, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.
