Albert Camus's The Stranger / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (2001) ( )

The Stranger is really philosophical, and there is a lot in the book that is really open and ambiguous. It lets the reader interpret it how they want to, and in my case, strangely, I identified with the main character. More than anything I enjoyed the detailed descriptions and the food for thought the book gave me. Really a great read. ( )

"Aujourd'hui maman est morte." Fantastisk roman. ( )

Not bad. It appears to have all the quintessential characteristics of the existentialist novel. There truly is no plot.

However its philosophical merits outweigh any lack in entertainment value. ( )

For the first time I've read a book I completely misinterpreted. Or maybe that's the whole point of the short novel The Stranger by Albert Camus. Even now I still don't really know what to think of it. Sure, I've read the Wikipedia entry and the introduction, the foreword, the analysis, companion, etc, but it still doesn't quite sit well with me. It's a good book. In fact it's a superb book and the Nobel Prize for literature that Camus received for his work is more than deserved. But it still doesn't sit quite well with me, and that, I'm convinced, is the entire point.

The short story describes a number of strange events in the otherwise boring life of the main character who we only know as Meursault. It becomes rapidly clear that this personage has a rather peculiar view on life. It's not that he's manic depressive. He can't even be labeled depressed at all, but somehow this man goes through life empty with his only interest the sensory stimuli provided by the beach, the sea and his mistress. Then again he is not a pure hedonist. It is these odd internal conflicts which I believe makes readers quite uncomfortable reading the story. Of course all of this is to prove a point.

At first I believed that the pivotal point in the book revolved around Meursault apparently killing a man without any reason at all other than that the sun was in his eyes. For a while this event appears to represent the theme of absurdity which Camus tried to instill in the novel. Only after reading the later parts a few times did I realize that the responses to the crime of those around Meursault were what constituted the real absurdity. Meursault is questioned about his motives by the representatives of the law but they are more concerned with the fact he did not show the expected emotions at his mother's funeral as they seem to be with the odd murder. All the secondary characters are trying to make sense of the world while the protagonist takes life an sich.

As a reader you feel yourself stepping away from all those characters around the protagonist who are trying to either tell him how he should feel or who are trying to obtain some form of confession or meaning. It is the view of the main character of the events in the later part of the book that makes this such a fantastic story. It is as if you're in a slight psychological earthquake in which you find yourself re-orienting after the tremors stop. In that sense the absurdity of life that Camus first and foremost tried to convey is very well presented and represented. So much so that at some point the irrationality of the crime Meursault commits fades into the background.