The Stranger by Albert Camus
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Book Reviews of The Stranger
Book Review: The Five Points Of Fear
Summary: 5 Stars
I sometimes wonder, why assign this great novel to high school children? It's a handbook of perversion, in a sense. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but how many nowadays have read the book? No wonder there are incidents like Columbine every day in the papers. Young boys (sadly, they are always boys) read THE STRANGER and decide, if Meursault could commit a murder in far off Algeria, why can't I do the same here in snowy Colorado (or wherever).
We all suffer from existential angst, sad to say, and this book cleverly pins down the five points of fear, the points by which a good school psychologist should be able to recognize that a potential Columbine is likely to happen within a year's time. The five points include-look at the way Meursault deals with Marie, his lovely and complaisant girlfriend. Although he says he is attracted to her, he often leaves her for long stretches of time. He is disaffected, as the psychologists say. Camus isn't writing a medical textbook, more like a novel, so much of this ennui is a product of his own literary imagination. A few years later Roland Barthes took pen to hand to compose WRITING DEGREE ZERO, in which he famously divided the author's tools into three broad sections-language (for we all must write in language), style (which individuates us from our peers), and what he called "ecriture" in response to Sartre, Camus and other existentialist novelist for whom modernism was a disastrous wrong turn in humanity's social progress toward the Good.
Another of the five points of fear comes in Meursault's interaction with his neighbor, Raymond. Is it me or do these guys seem more French than Algerian? Today we would recognize THE STRANGER as an example of the colonial system gone berserk. If you are living in occupied territory, you can't expect to feel very stable. Spielberg and Tobe Hooper, telling the story of POLTERGEIST, picked up on some of Camus' themes when they set their poltergeist-rocked suburban home squarely on a forgotten Indian graveyard. What is difficult for Meursault is to make a decision. In this he reminds us of Hamlet, and as we know, the stature of Shakespeare's Hamlet was at an all-time high in the immediate postwar era, what with the Olivier film, etc. His eternally questioning figure rang a bell with veterans and citizens weary of endless war. For Meursault, to act or not to act are pretty much the same. How to detect a difference? Often we look for signs from the outside world, for example, watching a fly cross a table. If it zigzags this way, we pull the trigger. If it flies away, lives are spared. Think of Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST as another cinematic analogue to Camus' STRANGER and its five points of fear. Just the fly creeping around Jack Elam's face in the opening sequence gives you the creeps, for violence and terror depend on which way the fly falls.
Book Review: The price of living without passion
Summary: 5 Stars
As with most great literary works, there appears to be endless interpretations of this brief but strangely compelling novel. My own reading of it came while listening to a Teaching Company course on Existentialism. My take on the book will undoubtedly reflect my own prejudices and biases. Nevertheless, here it is.
I find I must disagree with the many reviewers who describe Mersault as an "existentialist" character. Far from it; indeed, Mersault seems the opposite of the existentialist ideal. Nietszche would have despised him for his lack of passion. Kierkegaard would have rebuked his unwillingness to take a leap of faith. Even Sartre would have found his inability to take responsibility for his actions despicable.
Existentialism is far more than just "gloominess" or being fashionably depressed. It is an outlook on life that admits the ugliness of the world and still urges us to take hold of ourselves in the face of all the apparent reasons for despair. In this sense it is a very empowering and positive school of thought.
Mersault is the opposite of the existentialist ideal. He eschews passion in all forms. Love, moral discernment, even opportunities for self improvement are nothing to him. He finds an odd sort of comfort in his nihilism. To him life holds no meaning, and this belief shields him from the sting of grief at his mother's death. It enables him to use Marie for his own pleasure while feeling no obligation, no inconvenient emotions, towards her. It allows him to overlook the shady character and misdeeds of his "friends." Even murder is a passionless act to him, one he regards with no more thought than taking a breath.
The only time he displays strong feelings is when confronted by the chaplain. He flies into rage at the priest's compassion and belief in an afterlife. Such ideas threaten the relentless despair that comforts him. In the end he rejects with finality all forms of hope and takes solace is his belief that the world just doesn't give a damn about him or anyone else. It is this atttitude that not only enables him to think about being beheaded but to look forward to it.
Camus, while not a believer in God, nonetheless had faith that life in worth living, that good and evil exist, and that the good is worth fighting for. In all of these things Mersault is his opposite, and is thus a poignant example of what existentialism has to offer. It is by rejecting his nihilism and passionately saying "Yes!" to life that we find the sense of meaning he so fervently dreaded.
Book Review: A Disquieting little Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Albert Camus' debut novel is brief, skimpy on plot, and written in the simplest and most direct manner possible, but this is as effective a piece of literature as any because of the brilliant mind behind it. Camus was a great philisophical and literary mind, and his books were always infused with a profound concern for the desperate, desolate human condition. The power of such a little volume as "The Stranger" lies in the very uncomfortable truths that it manages to uncover - truths which reverberate through the reader because of the spare prose that they are presented in.
'The Stranger' is deeply depressing, and for paradoxical reasons: it is depressing because we are able to identify with the protagonist, Monsieur Meursault, and empathize with his misery, even though he is barely capable of emotion and murders a man for no real reason, remaining remorseless to the end. The story of Meursault's meaningless life and the pointless crime that inevitably leads to his downfall will leave readers distraught because Camus is not simply writing about a sick man; he perceives Meursault's emptiness and nihilism as the mindset of any man who comes to understand the indifference of the rest of the world to his plight, and in turn becomes indifferent to everything he once found pleasurable; a romantic relationship, a good meal, a social outing, a swim in the ocean, and eventually life itself.
What hope is there for Meursault in the last days before his execution? He knows that there is no afterlife and he has no interest in reliving his experiences in his mind or pondering them, so what will he do with the little time he has left? Will he count cracks in the walls of his cell for a few hours of the day and sleep for the rest, or will he look for something else? "The Stranger" ends inconclusively, allowing us to ponder the question, and leaves us sick to our stomachs at the possibility that Meursault has reached a dead end (and I was literally nauseous at the end of the book).
Camus calls on all of his readers to use what imagination they have to make their lives bearable, and I think that this is what ultimately makes "The Stranger" so powerful. It's an important book to read in our high schools as well, especially for a generation of youth that indulges itself in the vacuous entertainments of the television and music worlds that do nothing to improve their minds or characters. It's not a morality tale, but a provoker of thought; it asks us: how close are we to being Meursault?
Book Review: The Stranger: Slow-paced is better?
Summary: 5 Stars
In sports, to examine the action closely, they do a slow-motion instant replay. The Stranger by Albert Camus is slow paced; there's one scene in the beginning where the main character, Meursault, describes in full detail his day, in which he looked out the window. That was all, Meursault just talked about the people who walked by that day. However, this single fault the book has is necessary in order to understand and accept Camus' existentialist message. Like a slow-motion replay of fast action, only when Camus slows down the life of Meursault does the reader see the entire picture. The famous image of the novel is Meursault shooting an Arab man on the beach. A fast paced action novel would not have given much detail-- which would have missed Camus' message. Saying that Meursault shot an Arab does not tell the reader anything, but having Meursault describe in full detail the unbearable nature of the heat that day, about the sweat running down his forehead and the sun pounding on his back, and by leaving out any thoughts about the morality of his actions, only then do we understand Camus' message. There is no God out there who care, he could shoot or not shoot, it would not matter either way. What drove Meursault to kill the Arab was not distorted morals, that it would be right for him to kill the Arab on a spiritual or vengeful level. Rather, Meursault killed the Arab because it was hot that day. He is driven by honest emotions only, and Meursault will be persecuted for this later on. Slowing down the pace also makes the story seem that much more real and detailed. I imagined the bullets Meursault shoots at the beach in the same slow motion style that was used in The Matrix. Also, the scenes in which he breaks his placid persona, such as the one in which Meursault attacks a visiting chaplain, are heightened dramatically by the slow pace. The outburst of emotion is far more exciting with a low key atmosphere surrounding it. This is important because the scene with the chaplain, where he discovers his own beliefs (existentialism), is one of the key parts of the novel. Normally I do not like a slow paced novel, but I'm willing to make an exception with The Stranger. By slowing down the action, the theme becomes easier to understand and the images become far more absorbing. Oddly enough, it would appear that the book's only inherent flaw makes the novel better on the whole, and therefore I would not be exaggerating if I said The Stranger was flawless.Book Review: A powerfully disturbing and bleak novel
Summary: 5 Stars
Although Albert Camus had achieved some fame as a journalist in his native Algiers in the thirties and as a writer for the French resistance during WW II, he first achieved an international critical reputation with the publication of this classic novel in 1946. The portrait of the detached, unfeeling, uncommitted, amoral, perpetually abstracted Meursault is one of the most haunting in 20th century literature. For many, it is the supreme 20th century literary depiction of nihilism. Unquestionably it is one of the premier literary efforts of the century, though Camus managed several other books just as powerful and superb in their own way, in particular THE PLAGUE, THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS, and THE FALL.Meursault reminds me so much of figures from the paintings of Manet. In painting after painting, Manet depicted individuals alone in crowds, failing or refusing to interact or even acknowledge the others in the frame. In one famous painting, a lower middle class girl sits alone in her own little orb, sitting beside an upper class gentleman, neither acknowledging the existence of the other, both self-contained, seemingly detached from the busy world surrounding them. Behind them, a barmaid drinks a beer, equally oblivious to everyone and everything around her. They might all be on separate desert islands. Manet repeats this in painting after painting. Meursault seems almost as if he had stepped out of one of those paintings. He can at least communicate with others, socialize with them, but he cannot express strong moral sentiments or develop affectionate (as opposed to sexual) attachments.
This is not a happy book. The story deals with Meursault's almost accidental killing of an Arab whose sister had been harmed by one of his acquaintances, but the novel trivializes everything--the killing, his subsequent arrest, his imprisonment, his trial and conviction, and his sentencing. The closest the novel comes to a happy sentiment is near the end when Meursault imagines how much nicer it would be to witness an execution rather than be executed, to have to puke in revulsion than to literally lose one's head to the guillotine.
Camus would never write such a despairing book again. THE PLAGUE the next year would come close, but not close, while THE FALL would seem almost optimistic and upbeat in comparison. But for those who want to find perhaps the quintessential expression of what we like to think of as existentialism, this could stand as the premier literary instance.