Tragic and ridiculous

“Oh, I know it’s an absurd situation,” the doctor at the heart of Albert Camus’s novel The Plague says as the epidemic around him escalates, “but we’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.”

Camus’s 1947 novel has found new readers as the coronavirus epidemic unfolds.The story of an Algerian town grappling with an outbreak of bubonic plague, it moves from popular disbelief and official prevarication to isolation and exile from everything that used to be ordinary, and currently reads less like an allegory of Nazi occupation than a study of the human spirit under duress. Camus’s tone is measured, his own and