Review: The Stranger

The Stranger by Albert Camus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The book starts out as a slice of life in Algiers in the 1930s, until a crime is committed and we follow the trial. The narrator/protagonist is indeed strange, as he seems indifferent to most things and people, just going through the motions of life, with little empathy and care, and the only time he seems to care about something is about sex with his girlfriend. Spoilers below:
(view spoiler)[I will admit that it took me a while into the book to realize that the narrator/protagonist is a psychopath, and only then I started to see the point of the book. Maybe this is the literary groundbreaking aspect of the book, that it was being told from the point of view of a psychopath? Otherwise, I cannot see how it was philosophically groundbreaking or even remarkable. It seems to me that philosophically, the only important part of the book is a single conversation that happens at the very end of the book, when there is finally some sort of vindication to the story being told, when the authors ideas are exposed; and I guess it has some weight precisely because of the framing as being the words of a psychopath, who is free to say things like that; who is free to ponder the meaning of life without consideration for the psychological and social (including religious) aspects, as he really doesn't care for that. Then finally, it makes you think. And maybe you can go back and appreciate some of the subtleties of the earlier parts of the story. (hide spoiler)]
But it's likely that this novel had such a big impact because of the novelty at the time, because of the context in which it was written. I think that today, almost 80 years after it was first published, after we are familiar with existentialism, it is hard to feel the shock and impact that the novel delivered at the time it came out.
One more thing that I found interesting is the fact that a lot of descriptions of the novel point out that it came out in Germany-occupied France (Algiers was a colony) during WW2, and that remarkably, the German government did not censor it. I really do not see what it could possibly have found to censor - the novel does not feel subversive at all. At best there is a clear anti-church message to it, but that's not something Nazis would be necessarily against. Other than that, you need to do a lot of interpretation and read a lot of commentary to get any subversive meaning out of this novel.
Well, at least it was short.

View all my reviews