A Horrid Book Everyone Should Read!

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	• The Stranger Albert Camus Vintage, 1989 - 144 pages average customer review:based on 519 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Brilliant but Flawed

This is not light reading. Despite its length of 123 pages, The Stranger is a literary endurance test: exhausting, exhaustive, excruciating ... and excellent.

Meursault is nobody special. A pied-noir residing in pre-World War II Algeria, he guns down an Arab in cold blood on a blistering summer day. The protagonist is thrust into the limelight, and a man who once took life at face value finds himself examining a vacuous life.

Such is the plot, but this author's main interests lies elsewhere. Is life not absurd, Camus challenges us through his anti-hero Mersault, when human life is so terminal and soon-forgotten? If yes, why not thrash it and mock it? This question of the absurd has drawn many comparisons with Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, but Camus shook off the existentalist moniker, and this is a tribute to the Frenchman's intellectual honesty. For the idea of the absurd in this novella contrasts sharply with those of classic existentalists, and Camus's artistic technique differs as well.

My reading of The Stranger hinged on whether, like existentialists, Camus intended to create humor or artistic distance, and in the end, finding no such evidence in the text, I decided he did not. This is bone-hard reality: a prima facie argument delivered with raw power and skilled craftsmanship, but without, I think, sufficient perspective. Unlike Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Camus is not poking fun at a 20th-century Chernyshevsky or Hegel here. Camus is right in there with Mersault--dead serious--in this tract of complex ideas and stark layering. The protagonist's declarative statements carry a raw, political force, and indeed he's quite terrifying, and the novel will leave many readers baffled and disturbed.

In a word, this book is surreal, and when read from a surrealist's perspective, the book falls neatly into place for me. A central, philosophical question is this: is Mersault stark-raving mad, or is the world? And if it's the latter, is this murderer in fact sane? What does this say about morality and ethics? Camus doesn't want us laugh at his protagonist as we do Dostoevsky's underground man; we might agree with him instead. As surrealist Andre Breton would say, Mursealth is above "conscious moral or aesthetic self-censorship," where the convicted becomes society's accuser. The crowd is lost in self-serving hypcrisy and delusion, and only Mersault has the wit and integrity to tell them. In this way, Camus argues for his protagnonist's sanity and ethical grounding as he delivers a dark, foreboding message from the cell of an Algerian prison.

The author's sillogism goes something like this: life's unhappy and then we die. Life shouldn't be unhappy, even though we're going to die. Therefore, if we want to be happy, we must embrace death. Like all arguments, this one makes assumptions: people aren't happy, people can't find happiness in the absence of embracing death (such as through spiritual faith). Mersault shouts out his disgust with a rotten world and finds solace in it; he does this in a kind of self-declaration, where he's entitled to speak for himself if he so pleases. In true, post-modern style, Camus suggests we listen to his maverick. Surrealists typically embrace the idiosyncratic and individual while rejecting all forms of group-think--even to the point of refusing to define insane. So no irony is intended when Salvador Dali declares, "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." This is Mersault.

Surrealism was popular in Camus's France during the 20th century, but as a reader I nevertheless need to ask whether Mursealt is mad. Mersault is a man of acute awareness struggling in an insane world. This man can murder without contrition, and when the crowd screams out ugly bile in response, they speak with a twisted--but elegant--harmony on the matter of life's cruel nature. In this there's universal solice, and Mersault's individual, relative reality is conjoined with the universal's. Having come full circle, we're left in a moral conundrum where murder is sane. Now Camus has trapped us.

Or has he? It's difficult to laugh at Mersault since he's so disturbing. So I approached this question of Mersault's sanity by evaluating the argument, a dangerous foray inside a man's matrix. But this is precisely where Camus failed, in my view--a wry commentary on a book that was so beautifully constructed atop the human intellect. Kierkegaard avoided the trap of self-declaration when he acknowledged a universal idea of the ethical before allowing a need for a telelogical (i.e., with a purpose) suspension of that ethical, and only as a true act of faith. Mersault has no faith, and his suspension of the ethical is purposeless. That is, he has not placed his transgression on the shoulders of a higher authority. Faith is a paradox, Kierkegaard says, and a moral individual will transcend the ethical only on faith that a higher authority will intervene in this life. Mersault absolves himself of such consequences, and as such, morally disconnects himself from the world of mankind. If this is not a form of madness, then what is? I think the argument collapses here: what's missing in The Stranger is layering. Dostoevksy, too, on the other hand, layers his argument vis-à-vis artistic distancing by presenting his anti-hero in the form of parody. Knowing this, can't we begin to smile at Mersault's self-certain simplicity, despite the internal logic of his argument? The elements of paradox and mockery are not present in The Stranger, but should be.

It's a shame. The 20th century was the most violent and ideologically deranged century in human history. This is a great novel and an excellent read, but like so much literature of that era, The Stranger said more about the world in which it was written than perhaps was intended.

My Titles
Shadow Fields
Snooker Glen

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goth background research

"and the stranger - the killing of an arab"
It was those lyrics in Killing An Arab by The Cure that made me want to read this book. Plus, in high school, I thought I was an existentialist.
This story is really interesting and a great book to read if you're at all into the Cure - it's like adding some street cred or something - not really, but I feel somehow more orderly by having read it.
It's short, easy to read and gives an interesting view of life - it is written by quite a well known (ie. accessible) philosopher after all. One could call it a nice intro to existentialism or an addition to your goth music research, cuz you know you love to research music.

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A Horrid Book Everyone Should Read!

Albert Camus superbly takes us through the thoughts of a Godless heathen; A Nihilist. The author shows us the husk of a man. A hollow being who cares for nothing except his selfish desires. Our protagonist (and I use that label lightly) does not love his mother, whom he just days ago buried. Does not care, and looks on as his acquaintance beats his ex-girlfriend. He also does not care of the consequences or immorality of roaming the beach in search of someone to kill. He is mildly interested in sex. However, the woman whom he shares a bed with is viewed only as a means to the eventual end of satisfy his base needs. The main character is naive, loathsome individual whom everyone who reads this book should take great strength and pains never to be.

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A True Classic

I have used this book in a variety of classes ranging from beginning level French culture to teaching college reading prep skills. I choose it because students are often surprised at the lack of involvement Meursault has in his own life. This was the point Camus was trying to make, to be sure. This book is separated into two distinct parts: before and after M. goes to jail for killing some arabs. The book will spart a debate on racism, gender issues, cultural issues of the pied-noir and lliterary styles like absurdism. Did I mention that it is not that long? That is the students' favorite part.

Anyone should try it for something different. You don't need to be in a lit class to enjoy it.

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Boring and absurd

Kind of boring, and truly absurd as his philosophy represents. If you're not interested in his absurdism, then better find some other books to read.

reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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