Reading 1001 discussion

I have wanted to read Camus for at least 50 years and had never got around to it. This is why I love our TBR challenge. It came up this month and I was excited to discover what all the fuss was about. I read a Penguin version, translated by Robin Buss, which I loved, although a review I just read said another translation was preferred. Camus started writing this book, the story of a fictitious plague which devastates Oran, a town in Algeria where Camus was staying, in 1941. Camus continued the story in 1942 when staying in a mountain village in central France while recuperating from tuberculosis. He then became involved with the Resistance and the book was not published until 1947. It was immediately successful and seen as an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France. Although it can easily be read as such, I thought it was more. It can be read as a universal contemplation of how humanity responds to adversity, whether it is disease, occupation by a foreign power or exile. Although it is grim in content it ends on a upbeat note "there is more in men to admire that to despise". Camus warns, however, that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, that it remains dormant for dozens of years", an admonishment that seems prophetic in these turbulent times.

Read 2011
I enjoyed this book that tells the story of the Algerian city, Onan under the siege of bubonic plague. Through the observations of the narrator, the reader is presented with some existential questions; exile and separation from loved ones and on a metaphysical level of isolation and separation from human lives, that humans live in an indifferent universe with no rational meaning or order, ethical position to act in a way that is benefit to the whole, how people relate to religion in the time of disaster, The story is also an allegory; the plague representing German occupation of France during WWII. The narrator shares his observation of several characters and how they cope with the plague; the doctors, politicians, priest, and various other characters. The sea is used in Camus's work to suggest life and freedom. The people in the city have to go out of their way to see the sea. The town has it's back turned away from life.

The Plague by Albert Camus (translated by Stuart Gilbert)
4/5

This book was recommended to me by a fellow reader. I checked my local library and wait lists were quite long, I was not alone in wanting to read this book. Nothing like reading about an epidemic when in you are in one.

The bubonic plague is caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis. It can spread through contact with infected fleas. It is now extremely rare with less than one thousand cases per year.

The story takes place in the fictional location of Oran, a coastal town in North Africa. We follow Dr. Bernard Rieux as the plague emerges, crests, and eventually slows then stops. Since I read this during the COVID-19 outbreak, I related to the similarities of the epidemics.

“Among the heaps of corpses, the clanging bells of ambulances, the warnings of what goes by the name of fate, among unremitting waves of fear and agonized revolt, the horror that such things could be, always a great voice had been ringing in the ears of these forlorn, panicked people, a voice calling them back to the land of their desire, a homeland.”

“Viewed from the angle, the attitude of some of our fellow citizens resembled that of the long queues one saw outside the food-shops.“

“No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.“

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.“

I finished The Plague and found it to be much different than I was expecting and quite good. Camus managed to capture the claustrophobic and tedious nature of the quarantine situation (although in his book people were allowed to still go out together) while also keeping the fear and anxiety bubbling throughout the book. His philosophical comparisons, such as whether life was about experiencing love to the fullest (Rambert) or doing one's duty to one's fellow man in the face of certain failure (Dr. Rieux) or striving to be a 'saint' (Tarroux) all came to similar ends in the face of the plague.
I could also easily imagine the allegorical dialogue inherent in the book about a people under siege by a man made force (in Camus' time, the Vichy government) that the people had little idea how to combat although a great desire to combat.

Also all the references about conditions and data had great parallels to what I am experiencing now:

"And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination".

" ...no one in the town had any idea of the average weekly death-rate in ordinary times. There was no knowing if the preset death-rates were really so abnormal. It was only as time passed and the steady rise in the death-rate could not be ignored that public opinion became alive to the truth."

"The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation."

"We're short of equipment. In all the armies of the world a shortage of equipment is usually compensated for by manpower. But we're short of manpower, too."

And finally:
" The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path."

Having re-read (although it felt like the first read) this in today’s world while under lockdown I have to give this 5 Stars. Camus you wrote my life. I liked the way the book was about people and how they deal with the complete change of life that they are suddenly thrown into. Boy did he hit the nail on the head. We see the good and the bad, the kindness and compassion as well as the selfish need to escape and even the blasé it won’t happen to me attitudes of today reflected by the various characters.

If you are questioning how accurately this book capture the Covid-19 crisis here are a few quotes that really hit home:

“The townspeople were advised to practice extreme cleanliness”

“There was talk of requisitioning a school and opening an auxiliary hospital”

“Proclaim a state of plague stop close the town”

“Also, no one in the town had any idea of the average weekly death rate in ordinary times. The population of the town was about two hundred thousand. There was no knowing if the present death rate were really so abnormal. This is, in fact, the kind of statistics that nobody ever troubles much about, notwithstanding that its interest is obvious. The public lacked, in short, standards of comparison.”

“indeed the death-graph was rising less steeply. Only they lacked the adequate means of coping with the disease.”

“The plague was no respecter of persons and under its despotic rule everyone from the warden down to the humblest delinquent, was under sentence”

“The fact that the graph after its long rising curve had flattened out seemed to many…reassuring”

And a positive thought for the future Camus says we will get back to normality.

“naturally our fellow citizens’ strongest desire was, and would be, to behave as if nothing had changed”

I read this feeling a little jealous of the relative freedom that the people of Oran had (apart from the quarantining of relatives of plague victims). Churches and cafes were still open!

I don't think this book would have resonated as much with me, if I had not lived through the pandemic. I expected to like it more than I did. I prefer The Stranger (loved the casual reference to that book in this one).

But I did enjoy reading about how the different characters reacted to the events, their interactions and identifying how it was partly aimed as telling a parable about the Nazi occupation of France. There is nothing flashy, the heroes are quiet and there is always the threat of plague/fanaticism/war (in the parallel) in the future thanks to the final sentence of the book.