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A review by benedettal
The Stranger by Albert Camus
4.0
I don’t know if I can do this book justice. The Stranger is first and foremost an experiment, pushing the boundaries of literature and philosophy. We witness a senseless crime through the eyes of its completely detached perpetrator, an absurdist premise that continues to stun until the end, with the almost farcical trial and execution.
The absurdist premise of a narrator who feels completely foreign to us human in his absolute apathy to life builds the tension from the first page. He’s obviously unreliable in so far as he convinces himself and the reader that his reactions to the things happening around him and to him are normal. The title is clever because it lets us know that he is different, an outsider, but not so much in the sense of being foreign, more so that of feeling estranged from the human race. There is of course additional subtext to the fact that the victim is Arab, but that theme is not openly explored at all in the text of the novel. Would he not have done the same had the target not been Arab? Would his treatment have been different?
I guess I’m missing some context on French-Algerian relations at the time, but it seemed to me like he was still made an example of in the court process. The second part, focusing on the trial, is a rather jarring critique of the justice system. To what extent is it fair to condemn somebody based on assessment of character drawn from unrelated circumstances. It feels so absurd, it’s genuinely hard to decide who’s right in this situation. He’s obviously a sociopath, but the trial also feels dishonest.
And then there’s the lack of repentance at the end, which shows how Meursault is just looking for a way out. The entire story read like an exercise in self-destruction. Going through the motions, acting completely unhinged, having nothing to lose. People around Meursault treat him like a peer, expect of him certain reactions. But he seems incapable of communicating in that language.
I think this is a great example of literature trying to reconcile itself with the struggles of human nature at a time of reckoning, in the history of the world. After WWII, during the post colonial movement, there’s no room for heroes. One has to ask what it even means to be human, when so much effort has been made to dehumanise entire populations and ethnic groups. And what about the people perpetrating these crimes against humanity, what’s moving them? I know Camus didn’t like the existentialist label, but that’s the first thought I had when reading this. Overall fascinating.
The absurdist premise of a narrator who feels completely foreign to us human in his absolute apathy to life builds the tension from the first page. He’s obviously unreliable in so far as he convinces himself and the reader that his reactions to the things happening around him and to him are normal. The title is clever because it lets us know that he is different, an outsider, but not so much in the sense of being foreign, more so that of feeling estranged from the human race. There is of course additional subtext to the fact that the victim is Arab, but that theme is not openly explored at all in the text of the novel. Would he not have done the same had the target not been Arab? Would his treatment have been different?
I guess I’m missing some context on French-Algerian relations at the time, but it seemed to me like he was still made an example of in the court process. The second part, focusing on the trial, is a rather jarring critique of the justice system. To what extent is it fair to condemn somebody based on assessment of character drawn from unrelated circumstances. It feels so absurd, it’s genuinely hard to decide who’s right in this situation. He’s obviously a sociopath, but the trial also feels dishonest.
And then there’s the lack of repentance at the end, which shows how Meursault is just looking for a way out. The entire story read like an exercise in self-destruction. Going through the motions, acting completely unhinged, having nothing to lose. People around Meursault treat him like a peer, expect of him certain reactions. But he seems incapable of communicating in that language.
I think this is a great example of literature trying to reconcile itself with the struggles of human nature at a time of reckoning, in the history of the world. After WWII, during the post colonial movement, there’s no room for heroes. One has to ask what it even means to be human, when so much effort has been made to dehumanise entire populations and ethnic groups. And what about the people perpetrating these crimes against humanity, what’s moving them? I know Camus didn’t like the existentialist label, but that’s the first thought I had when reading this. Overall fascinating.