The Stranger (1942)

There was once a boy named Pierre
Who only would say, I don't care!
Read his story, my friend, for you'll find
At the end that a suitable
Moral lies there ( )

The Stranger I have read many many times. It's a difficult book to review without spoiling it. I believe one only has to read the opening paragraph to understand this. In a way one has to read it to understand that what the writer did was portrait what is very common amongst us. Obviously that statement I just wrote, alongside the book itself, has been discussed and remains in discussion. I like books that seem taken out of a larger content, where you are left with a question of how much the author is involved in the writings. The Stranger is the perfect length. Don't give me 500 page make-me-feel-good books. I'd rather a short maze that leaves me puzzled at the end. I have someone laughing next to me as I'm writing this, saying that's because I write in the same way. Perhaps so but personally I think that is what makes a really good book like this. I still give it 5 stars although I wouldn't call it amazing. ( )

This book was a bit depressing - it had somewhat of an oppressive feeling that I just couldn't get out from under. It follows a man whose mother has died and he essentially just spends a lot of time wandering around and thinking to himself (at least, that's the gist that I got). It reminded me of a less motivated and purposeless Holden Caulfield, which I didn't know was possible. I didn't really enjoy it much but I did finish. So there's that. ( )

My memory of this book is less important to me than the memory of the context in which I read it. A year previous, the college where I worked announced it would be closing forever in 16 months. After watching my colleagues find new jobs and leave or get dismissed in several rounds of layoffs, during the school's final months, I found myself somehow still employed and put in charge of supervising the college's small library (because our librarian was one of those who found a job elsewhere) in addition to my increasingly nonexistent communications/PR work.

I was instructed to start preparing to shut down the library and to run a giveaway of all the books in its collection. I converted the study tables into book displays with their own themes and subjects. The Stranger ended up on the fiction classics table, and I eyed it for a few days before picking it up and reading the first two pages. I was fascinated by the tone and decided to sit down and read it since it was short and I didn't have much of anything else to do that day. I found myself increasingly annoyed by the words and actions of the sniveling weasel of a narrator, but I sat in my empty library and read it through to the end and threw it into the box of books I was setting aside for myself. A trophy of an empty afternoon at a soon-to-be-empty campus.

I'm sure there's irony in all this somewhere.

C'est la vie. ( )

Really short and simple book, but so good. Makes you think about life, time and what are we doing with it without making a big deal out it. ( )