The Plague (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) [School & Library Binding]

Albert Camus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1991 | ISBN-10: 0808519840 | ISBN-13: 978-0808519843

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Chaos prevails when the bubonic plague strikes the Algerian coastal city of Oran.

Product Details

• School & Library Binding: 308 pages
• Publisher: Turtleback (May 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0808519840
• ISBN-13: 978-0808519843
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,392,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good art; one-dimensional philosophy., June 30, 2000

By 

David Marshall - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Plague (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) (School & Library Binding)

There are more things in heaven and in earth than dreamt of in Camus' philsophy; but it is a lucid dream, as far as it goes. The story takes place in a drab town in North Africa. There is something dreary also about the narrator, who does not so much deny his heroism, as despise it. (Like an alter-ego of the narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, who despises his villainy.) One does not notice flowers or taste food much in Oran, and one gets the feeling that the buildings are gray. One wonders if Camus knows any other kind of town, or any other kind of life. The book is almost as dreary as 1984, and without the meadow where Orwell's lovers found pleasure. But perhaps that is part of what makes it a great mood piece.

The novel's main weakness is philosophical. It seems to me that good philosophy, if not art, having assigned itself so sweeping a theme as the meaning of suffering, will try to represent positions it attacks truthfully. Solzhenitsyn understands his Marxists, and Dostoevsky his atheists. It seems to me this is one place Camus falls short. I found something bizarre in the attack Camus waged against what he seemed to think was the Christian idea of suffering. "There are more things to admire in men than to despise," he argued. "Everyone is more or less sick of the plague." "Until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture." What is bizarre is that Camus seems to think he is attacking Christianity here. Actually, he is echoing some of the truths it has taught Western culture: man made in the image of God, original sin that one might call a sickness, the call of the prophets to rescue the downtrodden.

Camus' priest, who says that the townspeople should not fight the disease, is at best one of the straight men out of the book of Job, at worst a heretic. The skeptical doctor, on the other hand, is a figure of Christ in one dimension. Like Rieux, Christians have always "fought against creation as we found it," because we follow a man who risked his life to heal. Like Rieux, Jesus was not too heroic to show fear or doubt, and also came to a moment of alienation from God. In fact, some say the Gospel first caught on largely because Christians were the only people in the Roman Empire willing to nurse the sick during plagues. By contrast, French existentialists come late to the healing profession.

The question that never seems to occur to anyone in this book, or in the reviews below, is, could the state of having no illusions Camus recommends be the biggest self-delusion of all? Considering my own life and those of people I know, the Gospels are more realistic than the Plague, precisely because in them, tones of black and gray fit into a larger pattern that includes more cheerful colors as well. Miracles, the Ressurection, and the reality of a God who answers prayer, are in my opinion truths that must be faced by any person who wants to construct a complete picture of reality. (Not to mention meadows with flowers, children opening presents at Christmas, the sound of cicattas after rain.) Camus limits himself both by artistic design, and by materialistic dogma, to show life from a certain, narrow angle, and does it well. But it would be a terrible mistake to impose that view on all of reality, as Camus invites his readers to do. Camus does not add to orthodoxy, but subtracts from it -- and from life.

Camus discovered death, and depicts it well. If he had discovered life, he would have been a more complete philosopher; but perhaps he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize for literature. Read this excellent book, and let its truths sink into your soul. Then reach for Chesterton, Dickens, or Wu Cheng En -- or even Solzhenitsyn, who went through worse hells than a plague and came out more cheerful -- and see what Camus missed. Better yet, read the Gospels, and see more of it.

One minor complaint on the artistic side. How is it that Rieux's friends felt free to drop in on him at all hours during the height of a plague? Considering the doctors I know, this seems to me almost as big a miracle as if he'd laid hands on them and they jumped out of their beds and went home. Author, Jesus and the Religions of Man [e-mail]