Spark Notes The Stranger
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Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus’s extraordinary first novel, The Weirder (L’Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this tale of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched Algerian beach, Camus was exploring what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”
Now, in an illuminating new American translation (the only English version available for more than forty years was done by a British translator), the original intent of The Weirder is made more immediate, as Matthew Ward captures in exact and lucid language precisely what Camus said and how he said it, thus giving this haunting novel a new life for generations to come.
Albert Camus, son of a effective-class family tree, was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at Various jobs — in the weather bureau, in an automobile-accessory firm, in a shipping company — to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. He then turned to television journalism as a career. His report on the miserable state of the Muslims of the Kabylie region aroused the Algerian government to action and brought him public notice. From 1935 to 1938 he ran the Theatre de L’Equipe, a theatrical company that produced plays by Malraux, Gide, Synge, Dostoevski, and others. During World War II he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of Combat, then an vital underground newspaper. Camus was permanently very active in the theater, and several of his plays have been published and produced. His fiction, including The Weirder, The Plague, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom; his philosophical essays, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel; and his plays have assured his preeminent position in modern French letters. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His sudden death on January 4, 1960, cut fleeting the career of one of the most vital literary facts of the Western world when he was at the very summit of his powers.Amazon.com Review
The Weirder is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus’s compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, rumor has it that amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the dread of anonymity, spiritual doubt–all could have been agreed a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Weirder, but, is that it’s not mired in period philosophy.
The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, to some extent inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he’s imprisoned and eventually brought to examination, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The examination’s proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities–that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother’s death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts–so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.
Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the tale’s end–dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. “She wanted to know if I loved her,” he says of his girlfriend. “I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t.” There’s a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It’s undoubtedly right that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; but, his confrontation with “the gentle indifference of the world” remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. –Ben Guterson
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Personally, I didn’t reflect this book was very excellent. The whole concept of writing a book about a faceless man just doesn’t appeal to me. I know that all of Camus books are weird but this one just wasn’t one of his better books. The book just didn’t have enough going on in it. The entire book was about the faceless man killing a name and then getting executed. I reflect the book probably would hae been more appealing if maybe the man fell in like before the execution. It also would have been better if at the end of the book, he really wrote about the execution as a replacement for of just letting us hang, not knowing about what happens at his executon. The exection probably would have made the book alot more exciting too. So if I were you I probably wouldn’t read the book unless you are into really wierd, dull books.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The book The Weirder I thought was the worst book I have ever read. The whole book was pointless. The end was very dumb, after the whole book he ends up have feeling and being pleased but thinks oh well its to late Im going to be killed. The end killed me it was very terrible!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I was forced to read this book and I still despise my teacher for it. Its about about a man who doesn’t care about his mother dying, he doesn’t seem to care that he hung around the incorrect crowd and killed a man in self defense and he ends up paying for his carelessness. Excellent for him. I am still mad that I had to read this crap.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book brought me a chilling and troubling nightmare of what it means to live lacking hope, which according to Camus, is a positive expression of the freedom of pushing a mute rock up a hill forever in joy as he explicates in his discursive book, The Myth of Sisyphus. But when a spiritual and religious person reads this ‘fiction’, she will admit the truth that Camus’ work never ceases to capture itself in death-glorification, even, as in the final paragraph of this book, the weirder finds himself ‘as having been pleased and pleased still’, at the thought of the advent of his death, taking joy in the expectation (which, ironically, is a treachery of Camus’ conception of loss of hope as being a positive thing) of the spectacle of his death of execution and the jeers of the mob of spectators as they see him killed. The ‘protagonist’ of The Weirder is a cold-hearted emotionless character, and throughout this whole book of ‘fiction’ he turns the stomach. Read it only if you want to be that spectator of a man who willfully denies having hope, faith, and like, building a spectacle of himself for all to see, in that ancient literary post-modern fashion. I didnt have any kind of guidance when i first read it, a name to tell me that to read Camus was a taking part in the spectacle of a hopeless death, which again, is a excellent thing for him. He make take joy in hopelessness and the loss of God…Oh its such a twisted vision, one thinks. What freedom it is to rebel against freedom! How free must i be!!!! So, in all seriousness, perhaps one could read it to be more informed about hopeless and selfishly joyful atheism, but only to use your criticism available and valuable to others who are truly inquiring into what life is and what it is worth, to expose the unfortunate cowardliness of Camus, The Weirder.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book really, really sucks.
It doesn’t even DESERVE a more in-depth review. UGH.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5