"The Plague" By Albert Camus

Le Peste, written in 1947 by Albert Camus, largely as a metaphor for the suffering France and himself have gone through during the German occupation in World War II.  The book depicts the life of a 200,000 people medium-sized town in French Northern Africa, from before the striking of a plague epidemic to a little after the epidemic passed.  Camus describes the lives of the people before and during the plague, their behavior, their ways of coping, their relationships, thoughts, dreams.  Several characters are fundamental in the book like that of the main character Dr. Riueu who is different from the unnamed narrator of the book.

There is a criminal who is hiding in the city and how is probably a metaphor for the traitor Vichy regime in France.  There is a journalist who is trying to escape, but eventually joins the fight against the plague.  There is another doctor, Riueu's colleague who dies in the last paragraphs of the book after surviving the entire plague.  There is the man who has retired in his 40s and is happy everyday regardless of what is happening around him.  There are the separated lovers, the wives abroad, the children, the dogs, the cats and the rats, especially the rats.

Camus describes how Riueu takes a swim in the ocean one day while the plague is in full swing, just to be able to feel how normalcy used to feel before.  The underlying message of the book is that horrible, abnormal, heart-breaking things have happened, do happen and will continue to happen throughout human history, but humans have adapted to even the worst of conditions.  Humans have adapted to live under the terrible plague, hundreds dying each day, just like they adapted to live under a terrible Nazi regime which murdered people daily.  Eventually, the plague passes, and everything is back to normal. It has to be.  There is no other way to go forward, to survive. 

But the plague bacillus, just like war, never dies.  Only waits in hiding until the next opportunity.