A parable of the highest order, The Plague tells the story of a terrible disease that descends upon Oran, Algiers, in a year unknown. After rats crawl from the sewer to die in the streets, people soon begin perishing from terrible afflictions. How the main characters in the book--a journalist, a doctor and a priest--face humanity in the wake of the plague presents one of the book's many lessons. The book deserves to be read on several levels, because the pandemic in The Plague represents any of a number of worldwide catastrophes--both past and future--and the difficult choices everyone must make to survive them.


The New York Times Book Review, Stephen Spender
The message is not the highest form of creative art, but it may be of such importance for our time that to dismiss it in the name of artistic criticism would be to blaspheme against the human spirit.





Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

ANNOTATION

An epidemic serves a telling symbol for the Nazi occupation of France, and, by extension, for human existence as a whole.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature.

FROM THE CRITICS

Stephen Spender - Books of the Century; New York Times review August 1948