From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

Grand's desire to write a flawless manuscript may be admirable, but it is also debilitating. A flawless manuscript is an ideal, but it is also impossible. To write a flawless manuscript would be akin, then, with curing the plague. Neither is possible. Camus thus outlines the inverse of the habitual daily routines that take up the days of most of the inhabitants of Oran: a complete lack of action because of an understanding that the ideal can never be attained. Both ways of being are ultimately isolating and stultifying; both are meaningless. As the plague progresses, though, and Grand begins to try to help fight the disease, a third option for facing the meaninglessness of life appears: acknowledge the absurd impossibility of winning the struggle for the ideal, and then struggle anyway; only in such a knowing, futile structure can an individual carve out both self-meaning and community.