Paperback, 349 pages
German language
Published Nov. 30, 1998 by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH.
Die Stadt Oran wird von rätselhaften Ereignissen heimgesucht. Die Ratten kommen aus den Kanälen und verenden auf den Straßen. Kurze Zeit später sterben die ersten Menschen an einem heimtückischen Fieber, und bald ist es nicht mehr zu leugnen: Die Pest wütet in der Stadt. Oran wird hermetisch abgeriegelt. Ein Entkommen ist nicht möglich.
«Sie gingen weiter ihren Geschäften nach, bereiteten Reisen vor, bildeten sich Meinungen. Wie hätten sie einen Gedanken an die Pest verschwenden sollen, die jede Zukunft unmöglich macht, Reisen storniert, den Austausch von Meinungen zum Schweigen bringt?»
Es sind Passagen wie diese, die Camus’ Klassiker zu neuer Wucht verhelfen, die ihn auch für die heutige Zeit unverzichtbar machen.
(Quelle: Rowohlt Verlag)
Just finished this. Quite hard work, and obviously now we've all lived through COVID, it's less "amazing thing that will never happen" and more "a bit like 2020". I'm glad I ploughed through it, but I didn't really gel with any of the characters, and the storytelling device was a bit strange.
La vida en una ciudad confinada, nos hace recordar en muchos aspectos a lo que vivimos en la crisis del Covid, conteniendo todo lo bueno y lo malo de la naturaleza humana. Bajo el velo gris del tedio, cuando la situación parece eterna, o del miedo y de la esperanza, cuando los acontecimientos parece que se precipitan. Escrito a modo de crónica, no tanto periodística, sino levantando acta metódica y dando fe de lo ocurrido. Solo al final se desvela la identidad del cronista, que quiso dejar escrito "para testimoniar a favor de los apestados, para dejar por lo menos un recuerdo de la injusticia y de la violencia que les había sido hecha y para decir simplemente algo que se aprende en medio de las plagas: que hay en los hombres más cosas dignas de admiración que de desprecio". Uno de esos libros que todo el mundo debería leer.
"He wanted to do what all those around him were doing, apparently believing that the plague can come and go without the hearts of men being changed"
I had to slow way down for this read. It is concise, dark, and, if I'm honest, it left me more than a little hopeless. Camus is a masterful writer and an exquisite buzz kill.
Perhaps out of a sense of morbidity, I decided that now - in the midst of a pandemic which has exiled almost all of us to the confines of our homes - would be as good a time as any to return, and finally to finish, Camus' The Plague. I had started the book a couple of years ago, but alas the writing of my Masters' thesis tore me away, and from then other distractions thrust themselves upon me.
I absolutely adored it. The strange, occasionally detached style of narration makes the experience slightly rough going at the start, but as the narrative begins to unfurl and the characters involved in this story more fully develop, the narrator allows himself to talk somewhat more 'subjectively' about these experiences. I found myself in love with the richness of these characters - particularly Jean Tarrou, who becomes Rieux's closest friend and …
Perhaps out of a sense of morbidity, I decided that now - in the midst of a pandemic which has exiled almost all of us to the confines of our homes - would be as good a time as any to return, and finally to finish, Camus' The Plague. I had started the book a couple of years ago, but alas the writing of my Masters' thesis tore me away, and from then other distractions thrust themselves upon me.
I absolutely adored it. The strange, occasionally detached style of narration makes the experience slightly rough going at the start, but as the narrative begins to unfurl and the characters involved in this story more fully develop, the narrator allows himself to talk somewhat more 'subjectively' about these experiences. I found myself in love with the richness of these characters - particularly Jean Tarrou, who becomes Rieux's closest friend and confidant in this book.
The parallels with France under Nazi occupation are clear, but we can nevertheless take much from it today. This is a bleak, tragic book but not without optimism or hope. The danger we face today, at a time when Fascism is returning to us again, is that we lose our 'sense' of the true cost of Fascism. Like the plague, it will always be with us as long as the will-to-fascism within us is not driven out. In a powerful and moving speech by Tarrou, he says that "Yes, indeed, Rieux, it is very tiring to be a plague victim. But it is still more tiring not to want to be one. This is why everyone appears tired, because nowadays everyone is a little infected. But this is why a few, who want to cease to be victims, experience an extreme form of tiredness from which nothing except death will deliver them."
Only eight years after Camus' untimely and tragic death, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari published [b: Anti-Oedipus|118317|Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia|Gilles Deleuze|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347698453l/118317.SY75.jpg|113899] (1968). In a now-famous preface to the book, their friend Michel Foucault wrote that their book should be understood as a 'guide to anti-fascist life', and that "the major enemy [of the book] is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."
This is the plague which Camus believes infects us and which, without constant struggle against it, will always risk re-emerging from the sewers of society. It is not enough merely to oppose Fascism in its historical form, we must oppose and root out those elements of fascism - the love of power, of violence, of superiority - in our own minds which give birth to it. "I know that we must constantly keep a watch on ourselves to avoid being distracted for a moment and find ourselves breathing in another person's face and infecting him." If not, then "perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city." This book speaks profoundly and beautifully to the universal desire for peace on this earth and what it might take to make it a reality.
"That is why this epidemic has taught me nothing except that it must be fought at your side. I have absolute knowledge of this - yes Rieux, I know everything about life, as you can see - that everyone has inside it himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, is immune. [...] All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims - and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence."
Unglaublich gute Beschreibung der Atmosphäre, ich spüre immer noch dieses Wind, der durch die Gassen streift. Verschlungen.
A great and relevant read about what happens when we are complacent in the face of great danger.
It is always difficult to review a book of collected works and this one is more difficult than most. I loved The Plague and would give it four stars for sure. But a couple of the stories in here were extremely problematic (Camus was not known for being an anti-racist, feminist.) Some of it was just rather boring. That said, reading The Plague was exactly the kind of dark meditation on life that I needed right now. Yes. We are all on a losing battle with death. There is often not much we as individuals can do about the worst that happens - war, disease, sociopaths. But we can struggle and fight and find joy and commiserate with all the other poor fools in this same mess that we are in.
My favorite of Camus' novels (which is a very hard superlative to give)
A great book. Perfect successor to the Stranger and the Myth of Sisyphus. Only four stars because there are no women.
I never could finish this book. I tried and tried, and years later I finally pulled it from the shelf, the bookmark still in place, and chucked it in the trade box. The Stranger was so good, and the Plague was supposed to be his best work, but it was dreadful. I couldn't do it. wish I felt differently.
At the start of the restrictions on "social distance" intended to prevent or at least slow the spread of the corona virus, I recommended some books to read during quarantine and social isolation, and this was one of them. And since it's about 60 years since I read it, I thought I ought to take my own advice and read it again.
When I first read it as a teenager various people told me that though it was ostensibly a story about an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city of Oran in Algeria, then a French colony, which led to the whole city being placed under quarantine, it was really a kind of allegory of the Nazi plague that had devastated Europe a few years before it was published. I didn't really see it at the time. Sometimes a story is just a story, and that is what I …
At the start of the restrictions on "social distance" intended to prevent or at least slow the spread of the corona virus, I recommended some books to read during quarantine and social isolation, and this was one of them. And since it's about 60 years since I read it, I thought I ought to take my own advice and read it again.
When I first read it as a teenager various people told me that though it was ostensibly a story about an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city of Oran in Algeria, then a French colony, which led to the whole city being placed under quarantine, it was really a kind of allegory of the Nazi plague that had devastated Europe a few years before it was published. I didn't really see it at the time. Sometimes a story is just a story, and that is what I thought this one was.
But now I am older I have read many more books and many more literary genres and have greater knowledge of history and experience of life, so perhaps I would see the allegory that had escaped me before. But I have to confess that I didn't. I thought it no more an allegory than [b:The Lord of the Rings|34|The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1298411339l/34.SX50.jpg|3204327] is an allegory.
Yes, a lifetime of experience enabled me to see things that I did not see before, so I was looking through different eyes.
One of the things I saw for the first time was that at the beginning of the book a journalist, who is trapped in the city by the quarantine, had come to write about the conditions under which the Arab population of the city were living, and that was practically the last mention of the Arab population at all. We are told nothing, absolutely nothing, about how the plague affected them. But when the Nazi plague came to France, the Jews did not cease to exist. I am sure many of them would have wished to be as invisible during the Nazi occupation as the Arabs are in Camus's book.
Camus himself was trapped in Nazi-occupied France, and when he writes of the plague as "exile", he writes from real experience. It makes little difference whether the exile is caused by political conditions, war or disease, the effects are the same. And it is not just those whose homes are outside and who are trapped in the plague-ridden city who are exiles; those who have homes in the city experience exile too, and exile, in Camus's view, is essentially separation from people you love and who love you.
Between 1966 and 1972 I experienced something like such exile four times, and twice in one year, after which I read [b:The Anatomy of Exile|2085708|The Anatomy of Exile A Semantic and Historical Study|Paul Tabori|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1411952570l/2085708.SX50.jpg|2090992] to help me to interpret the experience, and coming to [b:The Plague|11989|The Plague|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1503362434l/11989.SY75.jpg|2058116] with some experience of exile enables me to see a bit more of what Camus is getting at.
At some points I thought I might give it five stars on GoodReads instead of my original four, but a couple of things put me off. One is the invisibility of the Arab population mentioned earlier. The second is a small boy, the son of a rather strict magistrate, who is taken ill. His name is Philippe, but later his father refers to him as Jacques. Not remembering the names of the people you love doesn't seem to be a good thing in a book about love and exile.
