This book hit me harder than I was ready for. It was brutal, depressing, but great. I admired the simple, dry writing style that conveys only what’s necessary in the story and keeps the pace moving. Even more so, I loved the absurdism, the direct confrontation with death, and I always love deep exploration of someone else’s mind, even if that someone is fictional.

This 123-page novella was:

1. written by French author Albert Camus, published in 1942;
2. translated into English by British translator Stuart Gilbert, published in 1946
   • (according to Wikipedia, smart people have found inaccuracies in Gilbert’s translation);
3. translated into English by four more people—one was Matthew Ward, whose translation was published in 1989. I read Ward’s translation.

There are also three film adaptations of the book—the latest was released in 2025.

It is about a guy, named Meursault, who has some mental condition that causes him to experience the world differently than most. He must be depressed, which has caused him to completely disassociate from the world and people around him. The book is split in two parts; at the end of the first, Meursault is on a beach with some friends and shoots a stranger five times. The second half of the book deals with the tragedy’s aftermath.

That’s enough summary. You should just read the book. It’s short.

I don’t really know where to begin with this book. Meursault spends all but the last few pages of the book narrating his life in short, snappy sentences. It’s very difficult to pick out any distinguishing character traits from the writing, especially in the first part. He seems to not be bothered by anything at all, certainly not his mother’s death. However, he’s extremely aware of himself and his surroundings. He does occasionally have the self awareness to wonder if other people are judging him. He has this vague uncertainty about him: he notices things in strange orders and overly justifies his thoughts and actions. Some of it reminded me of Mark Haddon’s writing in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” a novel from the point of view of a boy with autism. (I adore that book.)

Meursault just doesn’t care about anything, it seems. He is not interested in a promotion at his job that would put him in Paris: “I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all”; he didn’t care if he got married to the girl he was seeing: “I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to”; Near the end of the first part, I wrote in my book: “This person is very aware of his free will, yet refuses to exercise it with any meaning.”

If you set aside the main character’s attitude, or rather his complete lack of one, the life he leads in the first half of the book is actually quite charming. He has acquaintances whom could be considered friends, he has a fun little girlfriend thing who loves him even though he sounds like an awful boyfriend, and he has a good job and plenty of free time for things like people watching out his window. His life is good by all external, objective measures. (Other than his mother’s passing, of course, but that’s a reasonably natural thing for a grown adult to experience.) Yet his mundane perception towards his world puts a damper on it all. Why can’t the guy have any substantial feelings towards anything??

But at the same time, I spent most of the book going back and forth between wondering “what the hell is wrong with this guy?” and “is there something wrong with this guy at all?” I’m not sure if my uncertainty regarding his condition’s existence is a reflection of myself in any way, but I think the things Meursault experiences and the way he explains them is universal to some extent—we all experience it, just with varying significance. It’s like the whole “everyone’s on the spectrum” theory. I’ve certainly had times where I relate to Meursault and his ideas about his situations (other than the murder, of course). Throughout the book, sometimes Meursault sounds perfectly reasonable; other times he sounds completely like psychopath and/or sociopath.

The murder scene reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Just last week, my English teacher showed us Vincent Price’s performance of it. In it, the unreliable narrator kills somebody, then faces his guilt in the form of hallucinations that cause him to completely lose his marbles—to the point that he may as well be throwing them—in front of police officers, confessing to his crime. (I don’t think the narrator’s gender is actually in the story. I made an assumption.)

On the beach, Meursault becomes physically bothered by his environment, to a point that he, presumably, loses his mind prior to the murder. The sun, the heat, the sand, all stimulate him negatively enough that he loses his sanity.

The whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my back. … The sun was starting to burn my cheeks, and I could feel drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. The sun was the same as it had been the day I’d buried Maman, and like then, my forehead especially was hurting me, all the veins in it throbbing under teh skin. It was this burning, which I couldn’t stand anymore, that made me move forward. I knew it was stupid, that I wouldn’t get the sun off me by stepping forward. But I took a step, one step, forward. And this time, without getting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it up to me in the sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a long flashing blade cutting at my forehead.

This goes on, culminating in Meursault firing five gunshots, killing the Arab.

Later, during his criminal trial and presumably under oath, Meursault again cited the sun as the reason for his discomfort that led to the murder: “Fumbling a little with my words and realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I blurted out that it was because of the sun. People laughed.”

He is conflicting: he’s aware enough to know that that wasn’t the right thing to say in that social context, yet his belief that he should be truthful trumps that calculation. Well, is there any calculation? And was that even the truth? How reliable is our narrator? How many more questions do I not have answers to?

Is Meursault’s lack of caring by choice, or has he, because of some circumstance beyond his control, been conditioned not to invest in anything? And where is the line between not caring about meaningless, socially constructed things and disregarding meaningful, expected aspects of humanity? Meursault’s prosecutor, at one point, “stated that I had no place in a society whose most fundamental rules I ignored and that I could not appeal to the same human heart whose elementary response I knew nothing of.”

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I’ve now typed more than 1,000 words and I haven’t even gotten to my favorite part of the book. The obvious climax in the book is the very end of Part 1, when Meursault kills the Arab. But I think the much more convincing climax begins on page 120 of the 123-page novella. For 12 pages, Meursault comes to terms with the jury’s decision to give him the death sentence because they judge the murder to have been premeditated. Before the verdict, Meursault’s lawyer tells him he’s sure the verdict will be a good one. Oops.

On page 120, Meursault, for the first time in the book, and for the first time in his entire life for all I know, experiences feelings.

The chaplain comes into his cell and begins to talk to him. Meursault becomes increasingly frustrated with the conversation. They argue about God, about life and death, praying, and about God again, until Meursault finally can’t take it:

Then, I don’t know why, but something inside me snapped. I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy.

He goes on for a good while. And it feels so good.

Finally, after chapter after chapter of zero expressed emotion, not even to the intimate readers of the character’s book confessions, he explodes. One can only be supple for so long, I guess, before breaking. Angrily, he says (yells?), “I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered.”

Then, on page 122, he “was able to calm down again.” He writes the first thing in the book that resembles significant enjoyment: “The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide.” He compares his approaching death to what his mom must’ve felt before her own passing: “Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again.

And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with the signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

Finally. Meursault says he feels happy. He feels satisfied, or at least content, with his current situation and the life that led him to it.

The ending plea for an execution with a “large crowd of spectators” who will “greet me with cries of hate”—the last sentence of the book—bewilders me. Yes, he wants to “feel less alone,” but why the wish for hatred?

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Socially isolated

In Jonathan Franzen’s Harper’s Essay (a post about it, plus the other essays in “How to Be Alone,” is forthcoming), he interviewed a linguistic anthropologist and English professor at Stanford University named Shirley Brice Heath. She told Franzen about the people who read books. Heath said most lifelong readers typically had “heavy modeling” of the habit when they were very young—one or both of the parents must have been serious readers and encouraged the kid to be the same. Franzen responded to her: “I told her I didn’t remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child except aloud to me.

Without missing a beat Heath replied: “Yes, but there’s a second kind of reader. There’s the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don’t like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you—because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren’t present, they become your community.”

…

According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What’s perceived as the antisocial nature of “substantive” authors, whether it’s James Joyce’s exile or J. D. Salinger’s reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that’s necessary for inhabiting an imagined world.

Meursault reminds me of this so-called social isolate. He spends his days in his own head, only speaking when he feels he has to. I don’t think Meursault would describe himself in this way though; rather, he sees his cultural absenteeism as a pragmatic approach to life.

Was Meursault an autobiographical character for Albert Camus? Camus contracted tuberculosis when he was 17 (he was 29 when “L’Étranger” was published); according to a blog post by some guy named Adam Setser, Camus took his diagnosis, and the lack of a treatment at the time, “as his death-sentence, afraid death would take him sooner rather than later.”

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I didn’t anticipate how difficult writing about fiction would be—there’s so much room for interpretation, and what if I get it wrong?

There are so many topics I didn’t even begin to touch on about this book: social justice systems, capital punishment, caring for elderly family members, misogyny and feminism, domestic violence, love, social expectations and nonconformity, the list could go on. I’m tired and want to be done thinking about this book for now. My metric for determining if a work—book, movie, whatever—was good is to see how long after engaging with it I continue thinking about it and/or referencing it.

I’m sure “The Stranger” will stick with me.

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Inspired future reading

Things I may or may not read in the future, inspired by Camus’s book:

• Kamel Daoud wrote a novel called “The Meursault Investigation.” According to Wikipedia, it’s a retelling of Camus’s story told from the perspective of the brother of the murder victim. It was translated from French to English by John Cullen, and an excerpt of it was in The New Yorker.
• More Albert Camus books. Also, “The Complete Notebooks” of Albert Camus is a published book; I saw two copies of the heavy, $45 hardcover at my bookstore.
• Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an analysis of The Stranger. Unfortunately, “Explication de L’Étranger” is in French, and therefore inaccessible to me. However, his book “Existentialism Is a Humanism” has been translated into English and I’d be interested in reading it.