THE PLAGUE
by Albert Camus
o-o
Did not end up enjoying this as much as I thought I would. For one, it's a sausage fest. I don't recall encountering any female characters at all. So strange for a book that centers on an isolated town, where each of the characters featured is to a large degree meant to represent an entire segment of society. Are women not part of society? Are there no stories about women in a plague-stricken town worth telling at all? Such an odd and bizarre choice.
Another issue is that the book could've easily been a third of the size and not at all been substantially different. It's kind of a slog to get through despite not even being that big. Part of the reason is the characters and their stories: not all that interesting. I really didn't care for most anyone, which isn't as much of a problem as my inability to even remember any of their names by the end of the book. Most of them, to me, came off as awfully interchangeable.
Camus also commits what I consider to be one of the most cardinal sins in storytelling in that he has one character deliver this long monologue about what the plague presumably philosophically represents, thereby attempting to drill into the leader the point of the book in the most on the nose way imaginable. Even if that point was actually interesting, this is a terribly way of making it known, but Camus' philosophy here doesn't even strike me as all that interesting.
But that doesn't mean there aren't things I did like about the book, there are! I certainly enjoyed the opening chapters, the way Camus describes the creeping in of the plague. How denizens would come across the occasional dying rat and how they would deal with it. The gradual increase in dead rats and the odd ailments people began to suffer from shortly thereafter, all of which is chronicled by Camus most evocatively. I do like how he makes it a point to illustrate how this town erected on the Algerian cost exists solely for commercial activity and it was commercial activity that governed its inhabitants very existence. Which would make something like being subject to a plague of particular economic concern, something I wish would've perhaps played out more in the novel. There is one character who takes advantage of the city being quarantined, and makes the crisis work to his advantage by being part of some smuggling operation, and I thought that was a nice touch, but it wasn't really a major enough part of the story.
All in all, an okay read that could've been much better, much slimmer, and far more profound on the basis of the premise alone.