Richard Sherman

4.5

i found it super funny at many points and started laughing aloud at the part where the chaplain is asking meursault to repent and turn to god after (spoiler) he’s been served his death sentence and saying “Every stone here sweats with suffering…But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness” and meursault says he only saw his girlfriend’s face in the stones briefly and goes like “And in any case, I’d never seen show more anything emerge from any sweating stones”, and then had to go and frantically look up on reddit if other people also laughed out loud at and found this depressing book funny, or if i’m just a bad person.

i read the matthew ward translation (which i’ve heard is more true to the original french than the stuart gilbert one), but i also found an urdu translation (translated directly from the original!) by bilqees naz and shafiq naz and now i need to trap some unsuspecting friend into reading that with me

ALSO, i read camus won the 1957 nobel prize for literature. so this marks the second nobel prize for literature winner i’ve read this week (with han kang being the first). i must say, we have come a long way in the standards we have for literature. but also i mustn’t say to much, lest i’m eating my words later (i’ve only read the vegetarian and am still making my way through human acts). but food for thought nonetheless hmm show less

I sat down & read both The Stranger & The Meursault Investigation back-to-back.

They compliment each other beautifully.

The Stranger is Camus' famous tale. Clipped & clinical in tone, it weaves a simple, yet absurd, story of malaise & murder. The Meursault Investigation is the rebuttal, almost breathless (& reminiscent of Camus' narrator in The Fall), poured out by the murdered man's brother many, many years later. They are yin & yang, separate, opposite, yet twins too.

For the budding show more philosophers or literature lovers in your life, both these books together would make an excellent gift set. show less

As a book that is meant to embody an existentialist ('but I'm not an existentialist dammnit' - A. Camut) and absurdest philosophy - yeah, fine, it works I guess. But it doesn't exactly get the motor revving.

I finished reading The Stranger a little while ago, the beginning of my exploration of Albert Camus. I'm disappointed. I shrug. There's nothing in it that I didn't expect. Or, I already knew what it would say. The only thing I didn't know, and found out, was Mearsault's relation to the murderer. The book blurbs had always claimed that he "gets drawn into" a murder "on a sun-drenched Algerian beach." Over the years (it being probably over twenty-five years since I heard of this book), I had show more convinced myself that that did not mean Mearsault himself is the murderer. I thought he would be a witness: I think because to find a senseless murder absurd, one must be a passive witness. Unless you're mentally ill, you don't commit a murder if you find it absurd to. So...what exactly was "absurd" in The Stranger? That was what I wanted to find out. Alas, I did not. Is something besides the murder itself supposed to be absurd? Life?

I know my problem, my reason why I see evil in the murder but not any absurdity: I'm too deeply ensconced in a theistic worldview to find life absurd. I feel befuddled by Mearsault's nihilism. I have no more use for it than Mearsault has for the prison chaplain's theism.

I'll probably read the key passages a second time before I have to return the book.
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March 17, 2025

I always meant to make another observation in my review. The introduction to this translation of The Stranger explains that the translator sought to give a Hemingway-esque feel to his rendering of the original French. Well, I can say that his intention was highly successful. This book feels very, very much like Hemingway could have written or at least inspired it. show less