The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus. Published in 1947, it tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of …
Description
The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus. Published in 1947, it tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's distinctive absurdist point of view.Camus used as source material the cholera epidemic that killed a large proportion of Oran's population in 1849, but situated the novel in the 1940s. Oran and its surroundings were struck by disease several times before Camus published his novel. According to an academic study, Oran was decimated by the bubonic plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks (in 1921: 185 cases; 1931: 76 cases; and 1944: 95 cases) were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.
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OpenLibraryIdentifiers
- LibraryThing key:
- 2147
- BNF ID:
- 122159507
Editions of La Peste
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Die Pest
Paperback, 349 pages
German language
Published Nov. 30, 1998 by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH.
- ISBN:
- 978-3-499-22500-0Copied ISBN!
- OCLC Number:
- 491621527
- Goodreads:
- 942451
La peste
Paperback, 263 pages
Español language
Published Jan. 1, 2020
- ISBN:
- 978-607-14-2302-3Copied ISBN!
La peste
Paperback, 263 pages
Español language
Published Jan. 1, 2020
- ISBN:
- 978-607-14-2302-3Copied ISBN!
The Plague
238 pages
English language
Published Dec. 13, 2009 by Penguin Books.
- ISBN:
- 978-0-14-104551-1Copied ISBN!
- Goodreads:
- 6965204
The Plague
308 pages
English language
Published Dec. 13, 1991
- ISBN:
- 978-0-679-72021-8Copied ISBN!
- Goodreads:
- 11989
La peste
284 pages
Spanish language
Published Dec. 13, 1995
- ISBN:
- 978-84-350-1506-6Copied ISBN!
- Goodreads:
- 1482370
Plague, The Fall, Exile and The Kingdom and Selected Essays
English language
Published Dec. 13, 2004
- ISBN:
- 978-1-85715-278-4Copied ISBN!
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
English language
Published Aug. 17, 2004
- ISBN:
- 978-1-4000-4255-5Copied ISBN!
La peste
391 pages
French language
Published Dec. 13, 2007 by Éditions Gallimard.
- ISBN:
- 978-2-07-034957-9Copied ISBN!
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