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La Peste

Sort Name
Peste, La
Type
Novel
Language
French
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Wikipedia

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a 1947 absurdist novel by Albert Camus. It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator in the midst of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the beginning of the last chapter. The novel presents a snapshot into 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 set 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's objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their own 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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Annotation

Philosophical novel first published in 1947.

Last modified: 2020-10-18 (revision #34572)

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Identifiers

LibraryThing Work
2147
MusicBrainz Work ID
6ae5634e-8e31-4d0d-bd8b-b699434291bb
OpenLibrary Work ID
OL1230772W
Wikidata Work ID
Q320372

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Last Modified
2023-09-15