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The Stranger by Albert Camus
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The Stranger

by Albert Camus

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13,55012452 (4.02)65
(36) 1001(43) 20th century(208) 20th century literature(32) absurdism(66) Africa(35) Algeria(155) Camus(176) classic(275) classics(190) crime(45) death(38) existentialism(884) fiction(1,892) France(161) French(711) French fiction(68) French literature(400) literature(428) murder(109) Nobel(90) novel(358) own(76) paperback(44) philosophy(465) read(255) Roman(52) translated(42) translation(85) unread(69)

Member recommendations

  1. TAir recommends No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre
  2. LCBrooks recommends Just Revenge by Alan Dershowitz, "Complementary works that create a powerful foundation for a philosophical debate on revenge."
  3. thorold recommends The Man who Watched the Trains Go By by Georges Simenon, "Respectable bourgeois discovers absurdity of life and commits motiveless crime."
  4. DLSmithies recommends The Trial by Franz Kafka, "Two protagonists on trial without really understanding what they're being accused of - it's just a question of degree."
  5. DLSmithies recommends Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, "A compare-and-contrast exercise - Raskolnikov is all nervous energy and hypertension, whereas Meursault is detatched, calm, and won't pretend to feel remorse. (see more) Two masterpieces."
  6. bertilak recommends L'Adversaire by Emmanuel Carrère
  7. sanddancer recommends Extension du domaine de la lutte by Michel Houellebecq
  8. roby72 recommends Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
  9. jeff235 recommends Mendiants et orgueilleux by Albert Cossery
  10. Troddel recommends The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist

(see all 14 recommendations)

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English (116)  French (3)  Portuguese (2)  Finnish (1)  Spanish (1)  Danish (1)  All languages (124)
Showing 1-5 of 116 (next | show all)
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 |
Showing 1-5 of 116 (next | show all)
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.
added by Shortride | editTime (May 20, 1946)
 
"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.
 
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Series (with order)
Canonical Title
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Dedication
First words
My mother died today, or perhaps it was yesterday.
Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
Quotations
And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Canonical titleThe Stranger
Original publication date1942
People/CharactersMeursault, Mme. Meursault, Raymond Sintès, The Arab, Thomas Pérez, Marie Cardona (show all 10)
Important placesAlgiers, Algeria
Awards and honorsWaterstones Books of the Century (1997, No 20), PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (1989), 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006/2008 Edition), Guardian 1000 (Family and self), Århundrets bibliotek, Cyril Connolly's 100 key books of the modern movement from England, France and America 1880-1950
First wordsMy mother died today, or perhaps it was yesterday., Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
QuotationsAnd I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first... (show all)
Last words(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Book description

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)

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