Mutasim Billah 's Reviews > The Plague

“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”

What is life like during an epidemic? The answer, truly, is that human beings eventually make a habit of everything given the time and space to cope. And eventually they get used to death, to mourn silently, to treat the new sick and to quarantine the ones they were in contact with as if it were a regular day's work. Because an epidemic normalizes the harshest and most inevitable truth of all: Death.

I really like this book, and I find it very relevant to the modern world, for the Plague is indeed life. For what is war, but another epidemic. For what is apartheid, and the many massacres in the name of ideology anything but just another face of the disease in our hearts. In a world where medical research grants are harder to fund compared to military arms deals, we need to really consider what the real epidemic is.