I noticed then that everyone was waving and exchanging greetings and talking, as if they were in a club where people are glad to find themselves among others from the same world. This is how I explained to myself the strange impression I had of being odd man out, a kind of intruder.
According to a 1999 readers' poll in Le Monde, the French consider The Stranger to be the best book of the twentieth century. On its surface, it reads as a quite simple tale; but because of this apparent simplicity, it led me down a rabbithole of thought and criticism that obliged me to conclude: This novel is a perfect representation of author Albert Camus' philosophy of Absurdism, and I can't reasonably give it fewer than five stars for that reason. Yes, I objectively enjoyed the narrative in the moment, but the experience is necessarily elevated by the further research it prompts; which could only have been Camus' intent from the beginning.
Aujourd'hui, maman est morte.I want to start by noting the perils of translation. This opening line is considered one of the most compelling of all time, but as an article in The New Yorker explains, right from the beginning, its true sense was lost to the English reader. The first English translation, by Stuart Gilbert, was heavy on British usage and rendered this opening as, “Mother died today.” (Gilbert also translated the title “L'Etranger” as “The Outsider”.) The edition that I read was translated by American Matthew Ward, and he found “maman” to be too perfectly French to change, so he opens with, “Maman died today.” According to Ryan Bloom in The New Yorker, it's a further mistake to have changed the sentence contruction itself – because the main character, Meursault, often references the future, past, and present as part of his own philosophy – so it would be best translated as, “Today, maman died.” And that's just the first sentence! Further to the nuance of language lost in translation, this book was written by and about a Frenchman born and raised in colonial Algiers – a specific setting about which I had never read before – and despite the frequent references to sun and sea and unforgiving heat (and institutionalised racism against the Arab natives), it took further reading for me to really understand where the story was set. It's also significant that The Stranger was released in 1942 – when France was occupied by Germany and the Allied Forces were pouring into Africa – and despite needing to have the manuscript approved by a Nazi censor before its publication, Gerhard Heller, head of the German Propaganda-Staffel, found it to be “asocial” and “apolitical”; failing to recognise how the Nazi Occupation could be seen to be satirised by the second half of this book, Heller was apparently an enthusiastic supporter of its release. Oh, but to go back in time and read this book in its original language and historical moment!
I'm not going to go over the plot, but here are some quotes that explicate the philosophy of Absurdism:
• Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
• Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.
• For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself – so like a brother, really – I felt I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.Again, my five stars represent the entirety of my reading experience with The Stranger – which includes all that I researched elsewhere – and if another reader fails to find much of value within its covers today, that's a valid response as well. For me, this book filled in some holes in my reading journey, and I am enlarged by what it has added to my worldview.
The Stranger was the book that I bought while I was at Shakespeare And Company in Paris - what a perfectly fitting French souvenir it turned out to be.
