The Outsider by Albert Cumas
This is one of the 11 books that I have to read this semester for class.
In a nutshell:
The narrator’s mum has died and he’s not too bothered. He goes to the funeral and goes through the formality, then later sees his girlfriend and she asks if they should get married. He says ‘yes’ even though he doesn’t love her, and that loving her makes no difference. He also has a few oddball friends and through a lack of caring does some dubious things that don’t really seem all that bad. Then he goes to the beach with his girlfriend and friends and gets into a fight with an Arab that his friend has a grudge against (this friend beat up the Arab’s sister and believes that she deserved every hit that she got). The narrator decides that it would be better if he took his friend’s gun so that the Arab was not killed. Unfortunately, the narrator then stumbles upon the Arab and shoots him five times. The narrator is then put in jail and is totally blasé about the whole ordeal and he’s on trial where the prosecution nitpicks just how amoral the narrator is and how all of the blasé moments from earlier now come back to haunt him.
The good news is that the book is short. The bad news is that it is written in a very simple and straight-forward fashion, which for a first-time reader can be dull at times. I imagine that this will appear much better on a second read-through, and the shortness of the book will likely make it more appealing. The narrator does have a revelation at the end which makes things seem better, but after 125 pages of neutrality it seemed like an effort to get there. I would have liked something to spice up the journey a little, other than being on a completely flat road the whole time. If I hadn’t been forced to read it, I may have skipped over a lot more without taking in the details and may have just rushed to the end. But it is very short, and I probably read it in less than 3 hours altogether.
However, I do like the absurdist angles, though these are often in retrospect now that I don’t have the book in my hands. But I much prefer a more comical absurdist approach, and since the main character is totally neutral in the whole story, I found it quite dull. The last quarter of the story, though, picked up a bit and was quite interesting.
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3 comments:
This book is translated as The Stranger over here, which is actually more appropriate from the french "l'etrangere" - which technically means The Foreigner or The Stranger. It's interesting that the english is translated different in different places.
I love this book. Camus is so good at absurdism, and showing what that really means. The philosophy itself is not comic, but more neutral and terrifying. People who are very religious, for instance, tend to have a deep hatred for this book because it goes against everything they believe in. We had a book club for this in October last year and our religious people were the ones up in arms.
Part of it, I think, has to do with the translation. You have to have a good translater for Camus to be good. I have a good translation, done by Matthew Ward. Who translated yours?
The first time I read this book, I didn't really get it. I didn't know enough about absurdism or the climate of Camus's time to really understand. Before the second time I read it, years later, I did some research on it first to get an idea of what to look for, and the book came alive to me when I read.
If you want to see my review, it's here: http://zenleaf.blogspot.com/2008/10/stranger-by-albert-camus.html
Mine is translated by Stuart Gilbert. Does this mean that we haven't quite read the same book?
That's correct. We read the same thing in principle but not in words.
Then again, technically, we haven't read the same version of Harry Potter, either.
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