Ms. Hen reviews The Plague

The Plague

Albert Camus

Vintage Books

1947,1948

Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert

Ms. Hen decided to read THE PLAGUE because it is a hot novel right now and everyone is reading it. She had read THE STRANGER by Camus when she was in graduate school, but after discussing it with a hen friend, she realized she didn’t quite get that it was supposed to be an existential novel. She was more focused on the tone of THE STRANGER, and didn’t know the background.

When Ms. Hen read about THE PLAGUE, she discovered that it is written to be an allegory about the Nazi invasion of France during World War II, but it was based on cholera epidemics that occurred in Algeria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ms. Hen thinks it’s interesting that readers can read this now, not thinking of an allegory, but thinking about the world today, and how the narrative informs current events.

This novel is about a doctor named Rieux who is in charge of helping the citizens of Oran, a town in Algeria, deal with the plague that strikes their town. The pestilence is first discovered because the rats in the town all start to suffer and die. Piles of rats are found in the streets and people are disgusted. Rieux thinks that the problem could be bubonic plague, but he does not tell anyone until the people in the town start to get sick. The government orders the citizens to stay home, and anyone who falls ill has to go to one of the hospitals, and almost all of them die.

The people in the town cannot leave and nothing and nobody can come into the town. Lovers and husbands and wives are separated, mail cannot come through, the same movies play at the theater, and the only way to get a message out of town is through the telegram. The people start to go stir crazy, and everyone has at least one member of their family who has died.

This novel is similar to one Ms. Hen read recently, YEAR OF WONDERS, in the way that the plague is contained within the town, and the inhabitants are quarantined within the borders. The priest in THE PLAGUE also gives a sermon about how the plague exists to teach them a lesson, similar to a scene in YEAR OF WONDERS.

Ms. Hen found some great quotes in this novel that she believes speak to our current pandemic. The narrator talks about how the town deals with the plague, “Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had killed off in all of us, the faculty not of love only but even of friendship.” Ms. Hen thinks this is a tragic quote, and she doesn’t think that our situation has gone this far yet, but she believes it could be coming. It’s an existential idea to live for the moment only, and to not have the capability for love or friendship. Rieux’s friend Tarrou dies, and he thinks, “So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps would have called that winning the match.” Tarrou liked soccer, and enjoyed playing it on the weekends, which he missed when the quarantine was enacted. Ms. Hen thinks that nobody wins the match when dealing with a plague or a pandemic, but we can always learn from our experiences and our as well as others’ mistakes.

Ms. Hen found a chicken in THE PLAGUE, and finding one in a novel always pleases her. The setting is a dry, dusty town on the coast of North Africa, and Ms. Hen can imagine what the air there is like, heavy and sandy, with an odorous sea breeze. Two of the characters go into a café, “On the table, including that at which Rambert was sitting, bird-droppings were drying, and he was puzzled whence they came until, after some wing flapping, a handsome cock came out of his retreat in a dark corner.”

This novel is beautifully written, and it’s pertinent right now, but Ms. Hen thought it was slow to read. Few women characters appear, which annoyed Ms. Hen because she knew that women in this situation would possess differing views than the men. Also, all the characters are Catholic, which confused Ms. Hen because it took place in North Africa, and she knew if it were realistic, Muslims would be present. Even though this novel has problems, Ms. Hen thinks it is excellent, and important, and people should read it as soon as they possibly can, because fiction can show us what can be possible, and it can also be a mirror that understands what we’re going through better than we can.