What You’ll Love about… The Plague by Albert Camus
It’s the most humane treatment of humanity’s response to crisis that you’re likely to encounter.
The Plague by Albert Camus has skyrocketed in popularity lately due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, much of the writing about it in the last three years has been about how popular it has become and what it reflects about our current experiences.
The human response to epidemics, and to crises in general, is remarkably consistent, and many of The Plague’s new readers took comfort in seeing that the problems they faced from 2019 onward weren’t unprecedented even though they were new to many of us. Most people in the U.S. and most of the rest of the world lacked a frame of reference for such a large-scale crisis, because global pandemics thankfully don’t come around very often.
Of course, it’s essential to be able to remind ourselves what to watch out for when a once-in-a-lifetime crisis does arrive, and The Plague serves that purpose admirably. It tells the story of a fictional plague epidemic in the North African city of Oran.
On display for anyone who cares to observe is the bureaucratic sluggishness and inadequacy that we all experienced in 2020 and 2021; the almost comical paralysis of civic leadership; the…
