Albert Camus

“We can finally read the work as Camus meant it to be read. Laura Marris’s new translation of The Plague is, quite simply, the translation we need to have.” —Los Angeles Review of Books The first new translation of The Plague to be published in the United States in more than seventy years, bringing the Nobel Prize winner's iconic novel ("A redemptive book, one that wills the reader to believe, even in a time of despair." —The Washington Post) to a new generation of readers. The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation, and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr. Rieux, resist the terror. An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, as well as a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence. In this fresh yet careful translation, award-winning translator Laura Marris breathes new life into Albert Camus's ever-resonant tale. Restoring the restrained lyricism of the original French text, and liberating it from the archaisms and assumptions of the previous English translation, Marris grants English readers the closest access we have ever had to the meaning and searing beauty of The Plague. This updated edition promises to add relevance and urgency to a classic novel of twentieth-century literature.

The Plague

Conor Murphy

In other circumstances, our fellow citizens would have found an outlet in a more active, outdoor life. But, at the same tỉme, the plague made them idle, reduced to making the rounds of their bleak city day after day, at the mercy of the deceptive games that memory plays. For, in their pointless strolls, they would find themselves passing along the same paths, and more often than not in such a small city, those paths were precisely the ones they used to travel with the absent one.

They deplored their ignorance about how the absent one had spent their time; they berated themselves about the casualness with which they had neglected to inform themselves, pretending to believe that, to someone who loves, how the beloved spends their time is any less than the source of all joys.

At that moment, in the night spanned by fugitive ambulances, he realized, as he would come to tell Doctor Rieux, that this whole time he had somehow forgotten his wife by putting all his energies into searching for a gap in the walls that separated him from her.

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