|
Loading... The Strangerby Albert Camus
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendations
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I disagree with the philosophy of this novel completely..I find it juvenile..BUT it's written so well that I don't care. Very thought provoking as far as person responsibility, the justice system, absurdity, and meaning. (  ) maryjanemanolos | Nov 7, 2009 |  This is not a good choice for audio. First off, it was four discs but only took up about two and a half (the rest was some talk on existentialism I didn't listen to), meaning that George Guidall said "the end" almost two hours before I was expecting him to. Luckily, I had a paper copy so I reread the last few pivotal pages of the story. I could sum up the story but that's not really the point. There's a guy and a murder and lots of absurdity. By and large I think I enjoyed it, though it was quite slow to start. I probably would have appreciated it more as a student, with a teacher there to tell me when to pay attention. Perhaps I'll read it again someday. ( ) melydia | Oct 28, 2009 | An interesting quick read. Very thought provoking. (  ) littlebear514 | Oct 4, 2009 | Mersault picks up a girl on the day that he learns of his mother's death. It is this fact more than any other that determines that a jury finds him guilty of shooting an unnamed Arab on the beach. He is guilty and we are faced with the casual racism of African France but here is also the unsettling challenge of the existentialists. What morality says that you should react in a socially acceptable way to events? By conventional thinking Mersault is showing himself to be callous when he goes swimming after learning of his mother's death. But why are we sentimental about death - he can not change the fact - he is not living with his mother. Why are we so critical of the unfeeling being? Does being human mean being sentimental? Camus explores and probes our consciences in this slight but important novel. (  ) dylanwolf | Oct 4, 2009 | Not typical of the style I usually read, The Strangers was nonetheless beautifully written and thought provoking. Many opposites seem to coexist, and the point of the story seemed to be only slightly tied to the story line. It is fascinating to read a book where the brevity in length and simplicity in language result in such a huge statement. I like how the social political climate is portrayed; there is definitely a lot more going on than meets the eye. (  ) melopher | Oct 2, 2009 | 
 It is quite a trick to write of life & death, as Camus does, in terms of an almost total social and moral vacuum. He may get philosophical satisfaction from it. Most readers will call it philosophic doodling.  "The Stranger,” a novel of crime and punishment by Albert Camus, published today, should touch off in this country a renewed burst of discussion about the young French writers who are at the moment making more unusual literary news than the writers of any other country.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0679720200, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
Abebooks |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
