Literary The Plague by Albert Camus

[ccowie]

Originally Posted by bfisher

Yes, it is hard sledding. I'm about 45% into the book. It reads more like an essay than a novel so far. It's hard to get invested in any of the characters.

Wow. I finished the book the other day having not been able to put it down. I was completely engrossed in each of the key characters and very interested to know how they would develop as the plague progressed. I was also surprised at how accessible the writing was. I read the Gilbert translation and found it very easy to read.

So I just finished this during lunch today. I have to say that I must agree with those who found the development of the characters rather limited. This made it hard for me to really get involved in the novel as the principal characters were rather wooden and uninteresting. It was difficult for me to be moved much when Camus also wrote of stages of mass behavior either. Camus does early on explain why it is written this way, as Lynx-lynx has noted, and reiterates this at the end of the book. Still in comparison to the strong well developed characterization of Meursalt in The Stranger I found my reaction to this book was pretty much meh.

To those who have mentioned that they are considering just abandoning the effort I will say that for me at least things really picked up from about half way through Part IV until the end, It is at this point that I found the book went from a rather dry chronology of events to an interesting discussion on what is a moral response to the situation.

One thing I'll mention that struck me, and it is usually something that I would not much note, was the lack of any character development for the females mentioned in this book. At best they appear as objects for the principal male characters to long for.

[Lynx-lynx]

At its rawest I regard The Plague as a documentary style of reportage, with pockets of proselytizing thrown in ......

For the first 30 or so pages I felt a sense of urgency and drama, wanting the townspeople to react with far more caution and care than they were showing. So, that is a sign of how the early writing (or reportage) got me in.

But then I started to feel bogged down with the humdrum of their daily lives and the administrative and societal changes that were forced upon them.

The philosophical dialogue was credible and consistent with the pen picture of each of the characters; but I thought that it was also somewhat contrived.

I thought that the universal theme of 'Plague' and its various impacts, whether they be isolation or separation or general inhibitions of liberty etc, could be applied to any situation where such constraints were unwillingly imposed on those to whom they applied.

And, yes, I too noticed that women, in general, were not much considered and were only added for completeness of story telling rather than because of their significant role in such a crisis.

Edit
I'm pleased I read The Plague, although it wasn't quite the style of writing I thought it would be.

[bfisher]

As Lynx-Lynx noted, this really isn’t a novel. Although it does follow several characters, the writer isn’t primarily interested in the development of the characters, but in how a community reacts to operating under extreme conditions like loss of liberty, separation from loved ones, and the high risk of death.

As noted, there are times when Camus gets up on a soapbox to rant, as during Tarrou’s diatribe on capital punishment. There were times reading this when I almost fell asleep, and other times I was amazed by the prose -

"During all the late summer and throughout the autumn there could daily be seen moving along the road skirting the cliffs above the sea a strange procession of passengerless streetcars swaying against the skyline. The residents in this area soon learned what was going on. And though the cliffs were patrolled day and night, little groups of people contrived to thread their way unseen between the rocks and would toss flowers into the open trailers as the cars went by. And in the warm darkness of the summer nights the cars could be heard clanking on their way, laden with flowers and corpses"

It was the best of books; it was the worst of books

I suspect that the main theme of The Plague is the experience of occupied Europe under Nazi rule, and of the responses to that occupation. Camus published The Plague in 1947, after having lived through the Occupation, and having been the editor of the underground Resistance newspaper Combat - was this the equivalent of the heightened risk of being on a sanitary team within an already dangerous environment? There are many echoes of the Occupation in The Plague, for example:

“What with the gunshots echoing at the gates, the punctual thuds of rubber stamps marking the rhythm of lives and deaths, the files and fires, the panics and formalities, all alike were pledged to an ugly but recorded death”

as well as other details like the stadium internment camp within the universal prison of the city. There is the odd little moment of a visit to the Place d’Armes where “Gray with dust, the palms and fig trees drooped despondently around a statue of the Republic, which too was coated with grime and dust” - a reference to the Vichy regime and the tarnished end of the Third Republic?

There is also the theme of the Absurd, and how individuals respond to the challenge: physical suicide (Cottard), philosophical suicide (Fr. Paneloux), or the recognition of the absurd condition and death and the human struggle against them (Rieux, Rambert, Grand and Tarrou)

[PandathePanda]

Really tried to read this but I just could not get going with this. It read like a very dry piece of reporting for a scientific newspaper.

[Bookworm_Girl]

My library hold is finally available! I should be able to start reading as soon as I finish my current book.

[fantasyfan]

The introduction to the book is excellent. It's clear that Camus didn't like to be pigeon-holed as an existentialist or an apostle of the philosophy of the "absurd"--which can be defined in several different ways. The idea that the universe is absurd in the sense that it is devoid of any of the meaningfulness and rationality that we search for in life--what Yeats called its "murderous innocence" is a theme that certainly can be relevant to the novel. Personally, I think that Defoe illustrated this idea in his A Journal of the Plague Year better than Camus. But of course that's only my opinion and even if one disagrees with it, a comparison and contrast of the two works may throw light on both.

[bfisher]

One thing I found interesting about The Plague was that while ostensibly it was set in Oran, Algeria, there was very little local about it. In particular, all of the characters in the book seemed to be colons or French officials.

[Bookpossum]

I finished The Plague yesterday. The following is the review I have just put up on Goodreads:

Read just as a story, this book could seem rather dry and dreary. However, read as a metaphor for France's occupation by the Nazis during the Second World War, it is gripping.

In the early pages, Oran sounds to be dry and dreary itself. "Treeless, glamourless, soulless, the town of Oran ends by seeming restful, and, after a while, you go complacently to sleep there." (page 7)

Once the situation becomes clear and the inhabitants become prisoners in their own town, all the best and worst of human nature is on display, as in any crisis.

"On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness." (page 118)

I read the "sanitary squads" as a metaphor for the Resistance: dangerous work, done by volunteers. "... they knew it was the only thing to do, and the unthinkable thing would then have been not to have brought themselves to do it." (page 118)

The populace in general simply endured the situation, walking about the streets aimlessly: "... the sound of a huge concourse of people marking time, a never-ending, stifling drone that, gradually swelling, filled the town from end to end, and evening after evening, gave its truest, mournfullest expression to the blind endurance which had ousted love from all our hearts." (page 165)

At the end of the book, when the plague has withdrawn and people are permitted to return to Oran, there is great happiness as people separated by the situation are reunited. But of course there are those who return to find that the person from whom they were separated has died. And they of course stand for the people who, at the end of the War, learned that someone they hoped had survived had not, and while all around them were rejoicing, they were plunged into grief.

"For the mothers, husbands, wives and lovers who had lost all joy, now that the loved one lay under a layer of quicklime in a death-pit, or was a mere handful of indistinctive ashes in a grey mound, the plague had not yet ended." (page 260)

My husband's uncle was a prisoner of war of the Japanese in the Second World War, and went through several years of terrible experiences with his comrades, only to die a few days before the Japanese surrender. So his family, and his young wife, were waiting for him to come home, only to learn several months after his death what had happened. Such grief after the hope that all was well would be hard to bear, especially in the midst of others' happiness.

A grim and powerful book.

On the matter of the peripheral part played by women in the story, I rather suspect that to Camus women were simply sexual objects. He had a reputation as a "handsome and energetic charmer of the opposite sex ... (whose) conquests were legion". (Introduction by David Bellos in the Everyman's Library version I read.)

I doubt that he had women friends, or that he actually liked and respected women, so therefore he would not think them worthy to play a role of any importance in his story.

[caleb72]

I finished this today and enjoyed it. The Stranger is one of my favourite books, so I was interested to see how I got on with this one.

Actually, I started by reading part of the introduction before the novel, so I had already established for what the novel was a metaphor. Usually, I just jump in and read. I'm not sure if knowing the "secret" was an influence, but I found the first part heavier going. I think it might have been because I was constantly standing back (in a manner of speaking) and comparing what was being narrated with the author's intention. So it brought some enjoyment, but equal to that of reading a text book rather than a novel.

Eventually I found that despite my early disadvantage, I became more absorbed as the tale progressed until after halfway I was focusing more on the story and keeping the analysis in the background.

There's a sterility to the writing throughout much of the novel, but at times, beautiful prose broke through. Strangely enough, this beauty was often revealed in the most awful scenes, such as that of Tarrou's death.

One of the things that I loved was Grand's novel. I liked how he was aiming for perfection, for his "hat's off" moment. The agony over every word, the concentration on the adjectives. Then at the height of his despair he orders the manuscript to be incinerated. At the end he's starting again - without adjectives. To me there is a parallel here about the life before, during and after the plague.

I thought this was an important book and a satisfying novel, but I admit that I had some issues finding the rhythm at the start.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I finished The Plague yesterday. The following is the review I have just put up on Goodreads:



On the matter of the peripheral part played by women in the story, I rather suspect that to Camus women were simply sexual objects. He had a reputation as a "handsome and energetic charmer of the opposite sex ... (whose) conquests were legion". (Introduction by David Bellos in the Everyman's Library version I read.)

I doubt that he had women friends, or that he actually liked and respected women, so therefore he would not think them worthy to play a role of any importance in his story.

You're review adds a layer of depth to the novel that makes it an engrossing parable of suffering and brutality. Well Done! 😄

[Bookpossum]

bfisher, I suspect that, like women, the "natives" were of no importance to Camus. And I expect that the French would have lived their lives quite separately from the Algerians whose country they had taken over. Most colonisers seem to practise apartheid in one form or another, Australia not least among them.

Caleb, I like your idea of Grand's novel and his endless polishing of his opening sentence standing for life before, during and after the plague. The need to start again, but to live life differently perhaps, after the searing experience.

fantasyfan, thanks for your kind words!

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by fantasyfan

The introduction to the book is excellent. It's clear that Camus didn't like to be pigeon-holed as an existentialist or an apostle of the philosophy of the "absurd"--which can be defined in several different ways. The idea that the universe is absurd in the sense that it is devoid of any of the meaningfulness and rationality that we search for in life--what Yeats called its "murderous innocence" is a theme that certainly can be relevant to the novel. Personally, I think that Defoe illustrated this idea in his A Journal of the Plague Year better than Camus. But of course that's only my opinion and even if one disagrees with it, a comparison and contrast of the two works may throw light on both.

Thanks for sharing this info, fantasyfan. I am trying to keep it in mind as I read. I am about 15% into it. So far so good. My version doesn't have an introduction, but I did some research on the internet so I understand the metaphor. I also read a brief biographical sketch of Camus. I found his acceptance speech for the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature very insightful to his thoughts as an author, and I recommend reading it.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_priz...us-speech.html

[sun surfer]

It's been a pleasure reading the many excellent and informative posts preceding this one. I enjoyed the book to a degree and thought it was good but it didn't entrance me. I liked the setting and the descriptions of certain parts of the town for almost the opposite reason as Camus chose it. To me this barren Algerian coastal city seemed exotic, mysterious and interesting whereas to Camus it was an ugly, boring wasteland. His prejudice and negativity towards it irked me at times but I suppose it made sense on a more philosophical level.

I read this before discovering the secret of the allegory. It took me over half the book to begin to suspect something along those lines and that left me with plenty of time to notice that as its own story it sometimes seemed heavy-handed and forced (the portrayal of the health squads were especially egregious in that respect). I think once one understands what he is paralleling this story with this fault seems more forgivable and less noticeable but it begs the question of whether such an allegorical and philosophical novel should also be able to work without the allegory or if that's possible.

There is no explanatory introduction in the Buss translation, but there is an excellent afterward. I especially love it because it is an afterward, as most introductions (any that discuss book plot) should be.

[BelleZora]

I first read this along with every other 'plague' book I could find back in the 1980's after reading Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 by J.H. Powell, a serendipitous, out-of-print thrift store find that was among the most engrossing books I had ever read. It was the early days of AIDS and I wondered at the different ways people respond to epidemics, so I read The Plague on that level only. It was interesting to return to the book now understanding that it is an allegory. I actually enjoyed it much more over 30 years ago, but maybe that was because I was trying to understand the different responses and wondered if humans had progressed and now handled epidemics with more wisdom and compassion. Wisdom...mostly yes. Compassion...not so much.

Although it has been three decades since reading The Plague at about the same time as Journal of the Plague Year, I recall that I liked Defoe's story best. When beginning The Plague this time, I had a memory of bleakness and that was it. Yet mention Journal of the Plague Year and I still see and hear the streets of London, and the frightened people with their posies, and the occasional sick person angrily intent upon infecting others. I can almost smell London in 1665. I think it was all the detail which I loved. I understand fantasyfan believing that Defoe illustrated the 'absurd' or 'murderous innocence' more convincingly, or at least more memorably, than Camus.