The Plague by Albert Camus
“You must picture the consternation of our little town, hitherto so tranquil and now, out of the blue, shaken to its core, like a quite healthy man who all of a sudden feels his temperature shot up and the blood seething like wildfire in his veins.” The Plague, Albert Camus
This book follows the town of Oran on the north coast of Africa through a plague that refuses to leave for seemingly unending months. It starts with the rats of the town all coming out and dying of the plague, and it seems like few people really take interest in what this might mean until the people of the town start getting sick and dying within 48 hours. The government and doctors of Oran want to keep the plague from killing the whole town and develop a system with which to deal with those who start showing symptoms and eventually how to deal with the bodies of those who have died. The town has been quarantined and we also get to see how that affects those who are healthy, those whose loved ones were outside of the town, and the people who were visiting the town when it went into quarantine.
We mostly get the story as Dr. Rieux experiences the plague, but we also get some sections where we follow Rambert, a journalist who lives in Paris and wants to get back to his girl, Tarrou, who helps organize sanitary squads, and occasionally a vague narrator. Important characters who also play a role in the story are Grand, who works for the government and on his off times is trying to perfect the opening sentence of his book, and Cottard, who doesn’t really want the plague to end because his life is better in quarantine.
For me, it was a really slow book. I felt like nothing much happened for most of it. There were parts that were interesting, but then there were also parts that described how the play houses were still putting on plays and how the cafe’s were still in business, and how the theaters had to trade movies after a while so that they could play ‘new’ flicks, and after those were no longer new, people still packed the theaters. Those parts, I feel like, made up too much of the book and were slightly interesting, but not enough for the book to fly by, or keep my interest for longer than ten pages at a time.
Overall, I’d give it a 6/10. There are two other books by Camus on my list and I’m hoping they’re better, but also maybe dreading reading them just a little.
Read on!
Molly
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