Jeez, could I say LANDSLIDE?! loud enough? And so I settled down for nearly 11-hours of a journey into the bubonic plague hitting in modern times (Takes place 1947 in Oran). Still, I don’t like contemplating an Extreme Lack of Meaning, but I HAD been having longings to get into Fiction To Make Me Ponder, and so I’d offered The Plague as one of the options for my Next Listen votes. Sometimes I review Classics here, and I always begin them with an Unholy: Good GOSH! We never read this in Literature class in high school! What on God’s Green Earth DID we read, exactly? For Camus? It was The Stranger, but of course, and my oh my: Didn’t our 17 and 18-year old selves think we were all big and mighty contemplating Existence?! Pretty sure it wasn’t Camus, and goodness knows I ain’t gonna blame m’self for it, but… This updated edition promises to add relevance and urgency to a classic novel of twentieth-century literature.By: Albert Camus / Narrated By: James Jenner 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.

In this fresh yet careful translation, award-winning translator Laura Marris breathes new life into Albert Camus’s ever-resonant tale. Rieux, resist the terror.Īn 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. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr. Fear, isolation, and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. ” -The Washington Post) to a new generation of readers. 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.

Laura marris the plague