The Modern Classics Plague (Penguin Modern Classics) Camus, Albert; Judt, Tony and Buss, Robin

The condition of book when it arrived, was really good. Thank you amazon for the lovely service. Looking forward...

A mirror to society. Prescient. The book make terrific sense in the middle of the Covid lockdown. In the best tradition of the French existentialists, Camus does not offer sweet consolation. It will make you think. The Plague is as ancient as Man.

It is a must read as it is quite relatable to today's scenario. Worth every penny.

Being in the midst of the plague of the 21 st century, finding what we are going through on each page. ...

Nice quality paper and binding with decent sized text. Thank you seller for sending bookmarks and mini calendar.

I got the hardcover one. So I expected the book to have a standard, but the pages were of cheap quality.

Great work

Good book. This is very useful for all students. It is essential for the students who want to read about existentialism.

The Plague is Camus’s philosophy come to life with a colorful cast of characters and an engaging literary style. Camus deftly weaves multiple character arcs and subplots together to highlight absurdist thought in a more engaging way than in the Myth of Sisyphus.You can almost smell the plague in the air, feel the terrified stares of everyone around, see the newspapers cheerily masking the death toll. The conflict starts early and tension is maintained so well this book scarcely feels longer than a pamphlet.I’d elaborate more but my reviews often don’t do justice when work is excellent.

We have no excuse. This book informed our culture, and we somehow ignored it??? What fools we are.

‘The Plague’ has become a best-seller again during the Covid-19 pandemic. It speaks to us as much today as it did to post-war readers in the 1940s. Humanity is always getting itself into trouble and never seems to learn fully from the past. Camus writes that ‘the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely’. Inevitably, plague returns in other guises - war, drought, fire etc. We do, of course, have one massive advantage in the 21st Century because many people have access to the internet. It is possible for friends and families to keep in touch, so we don’t forget each other’s faces or voices as easily as they seem to do in ‘The Plague’.A Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, Albert Camus received many other plaudits in his lifetime and ‘The Plague’ is still widely read – rightly so. In addition, Robin Buss has created a masterly English translation in the edition I read. Many students must have dissected this book from myriad viewpoints, including existentialism, religion, and philosophy. For a relatively small book it packs a mighty literary punch.War and pestilence inevitably change people. Whereas the plague is the making of Grand when he eventually overcomes his paralysis, writes to his wife, and resumes his book, it slowly grinds down Dr Castel in his desperate search for an effective serum. Cottard flourishes during the plague and goes mad once it is over. The only option was to learn how to live as a human despite the ‘endless trampling that flattened everything in its path’.Camus refers to objectivity and this reminds me of the most powerful book I have ever read – ‘If This is a Man’ by Primo Levi, in which Levi recalls, with complete objectivity, his experiences as a Jew incarcerated in Auschwitz. Such horror needs no embellishment; indeed it is all the more powerful without it. I was reminded of Levi’s book when Camus refers to the mass graves and train convoys to the incineration ovens. We can be in no doubt he is referring to the Holocaust.When death, like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, arrived in town, all eyes turned to Father Paneloux for succour and an explanation. At first, Paneloux preached from the pulpit that this was a judgement from God – the congregation were being punished for their misdeeds. But as the bodies piled up, he joined the volunteers in their fight against the plague. The populace pays less attention to him when he claims that God is testing their faith. Religion is seen as less relevant in this crisis.For me, the glaring omission of central female characters was disappointing. At the time of first publication in 1947, many women had fought bravely in the resistance and others worked in factories producing planes, tanks, and armaments. Women in this book have been reduced to absent ciphers. Rieux waves goodbye to his wife as she departs for treatment at a sanitorium and, later, dies. Rambert pines for his absent girlfriend in Paris and then hugs her at their reunion, after having chosen to stay in Oran to fight the plague. The only ‘present’ woman is Dr Rieux’s mother whose role is do housework, then sit nicely in a chair, mostly in silence, exuding ‘goodness’. To be fair to Camus though, even the men are representative and not the fully rounded characters we often anticipate finding in novels.Who can argue with Camus when he writes, ‘there is more to admire in men than to despise’, or, ’if there is one thing that one can always desire and sometimes obtain, it is human affection’?Despite the absence of strong women, I think this classic is an important and well-written novel with a powerful message for generations to come about what it means to be human in the face of adversity.I recommend it to other readers and give it 9 out of 10.

Libro come descritto

Great book, and very up to date and many thoughts to think about. It gives One much to think about.