The Plague

Oran gets sealed off and Camus spends the book watching how various people behave once there’s no exit and no explanation on offer. Rieux carries on treating patients without expecting to win. The priest preaches that the plague is deserved and richly earned, right up until he watches a child die, and after that he has considerably less to say. Grand keeps rewriting the opening sentence of a novel he is never going to finish. It’s the absurd applied to a whole town rather than one man, and the decency in it is deliberately unglamorous; nobody is heroic, they just keep turning up. The last page mentions that the bacillus never really dies, it just sits in the furniture and waits.

Apart from the fact that I just happened to read this during the first COVID-19 lockdown… I found this one to be a bit harder to digest than other works of Camus simply due to it’s length. The gloom gets all over you as you turn each page.