L'Étranger

Novel, Absurdist fiction by Albert Camus

Blurb

The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson

First Published

1942

Member Reviews Write your own review

0 Responses posted in December
adam.cook

Adam.cook

'the nakedness of man faced with the absurd'.

0 Responses posted in November
War_Mode_Gandhi

War_mode_gandhi

A humorous and fairly fast paced book about social isolation

0 Responses posted in December
mandavi

Mandavi

Verrückt - die Handlung hat mich einfach überkommen. Ich hatte den Klappentext nicht gelesen - das war mein Glück! Ich hatte nichts außergewöhnliches erwartet und habe diesen Schicksalswandel in den gleichen zuschlagenden Häppchen bekommen wie der Protagonist, mit dem ich mich überhaupt sehr gut identifizieren kann. Mein lieber Freund... Wie vielen Menschen auf der Welt wird es wohl in diesem Moment etwa so ergehen?

0 Responses posted in November
KlauDa

Klauda

Alleine dafür hat Camus den Nobelpreis verdient.

0 Responses posted in December
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