Everyman's Library Plague, Fall, Exile And The Kingdom And Selected Essays

Incredible quality for the price. Both in terms of contents and the book itself.

Book arrived quickly and in perfect condition!

Everyman's Library did an amazing job at the design of this book. The book jacket is beautiful, with a robust hardcover, and a strong spine. The written material is easy to read and the Introduction is by far the best one on Camus I've ever read.

THE PLAGUE I am only reading this book now, at age 65, because I was choked nearly to death with "The Stranger" in my merry school-days. When I was assigned to read it in French III (high-school) it was moderately interesting. But when I had to read it AGAIN in French IV the next year, I figured that was enough. No such luck! I was assigned the same book in college French, twice! By that time, I had my own view of Meursault: a man completely without affect, and a killer. But I kept seeing rave reviews of "The Plague,' and finally picked it up in the excellent Everyman's Library edition: The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays (Everyman's Library) . And I got a huge surprise. This is certainly one of the best novels of the 20th century: it is extremely well-written, and packed with interesting characters and incidents, all under the over-arching suspense of Oran under the plague, especially after Oran is placed under quarantine and nobody is allowed to leave. A situation like this is ideal for observing the human character under enormous stress, and this was the biggest surprise for me: Camus' penetrating psychological insights, which always rang true. For example, a doctor separated from his wife by the quarantine would actually spend most of the day thinking of her, rather than the deadly threat he dealt with every day. A journalist trapped in Oran decides to escape to join his wife in Paris: "I don't think I was brought into this world to write newspaper articles, but I may have been brought into this world to live with a woman." An attempted suicide (Cottard) suddenly becomes the most cheerful man in town. Why? This is a gripping novel. You probably suspect that quite a bit of it is grisly; it's impossible to write about plague epidemics from the point of view of a doctor without describing the horrific sufferings of the victims. But above it all ring out loud and clear Camus' views of the modern philosophical dilemmas. He includes some sermons from a Catholic priest, and other points of view, but in the end his main conclusion comes from Dr. Rieux, who simply states that the self-evident shines with its own blazing truth, and the obvious thing is for everyone to pull together before the plague kills half the people in Oran. Reading this magnificent novel immediately put Camus (for me) among the two greatest French novelists of the last century, along with Marcel Proust. Note: if you read French, Amazon sells the original version ( La peste (table des matières hyperliée) (French Edition) for an excellent price.

Best , everything whether condition & cover anything.