They continued with business, with making arrangements for travel and holding opinions. The people of our town were no more guilty than anyone else, they merely forgot to be modest and thought that everything was still possible for them, which implied that pestilence was impossible. Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people would notice if they were not always thinking about themselves…. When war breaks out people say: ‘It won’t last, it’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn’t prevent it from lasting. There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared…. Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us. Yet his message is not unambiguously hopeful: pestilences are always lurking, lying in wait for the complacent. He depicts people rising to the challenge as a matter of course to show us that there is more to admire in our neighbors than to despise.

Is The Plague a hopeful novel?Ĭamus melded his research and his own life experiences-transformed but still authentic-to give us the story of a city ravaged by disease in which everyone must choose a side: that of the pestilence or that of its victims. But maybe people are reading for reassurance.

Reading epidemic fiction seems like a short, straight path to hypochondria. Personally, I’d rather read to take my mind off the virus-something with dragons, perhaps. It makes sense to me that people are staying home and reading more, but I don’t quite understand why people are devouring novels about epidemics. Camus was killed in a road accident in 1960.Many thousands of copies of this book have sold because of the Covid-19 pandemic. His books include The Plague, The Just and The Fall, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement and, after the War, established his international reputation as a writer. He studied philosophy in Algiers and then worked in Paris as a journalist. 'A matchless fable of fear, courage and cowardice' Independent 'Magnificent'The Times Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.

Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr Rieux, resist the terror. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. The Plague is Albert Camus's world-renowned fable of fear and courage The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death.

The plague robin buss