Beautiful book and probably the author's most hopeful. Despite the death and despair everyone in Oran is subject to, the heroic actions and words are unambiguou

Beautiful book and probably the author's most hopeful. Despite the death and despair everyone in Oran is subject to, the heroic actions and words are unambiguously but unsentimentally those of people that choose to act, not cower, escape, or acquiesce. To me The Stranger felt like an indictment of the world as arbitrary, with everything that brings. The Plague discovers nobility in defying the arbitrary because we have the power to lessen others' suffering and it is cruel and cowardly not to do so. I highly recommend the book, I read the Gilbert translation. I wish Matthew Ward had lived to take on La Peste as well.