Book review : Albert Camus - The stranger

Hi Steemit!

Earlier I was responding to @adamt 's post Your favorite quote and this gave me the idea to do a review of one of my favorite book written by my favorite author : Albert Camus. 

When Gallimard published "L'étranger"/"The stranger" in 1942, Albert Camus was not yet thirty years old. The critic of the time welcomes this short novel, the first of the tetralogy "The cycle of the absurd", without enthusiasm and yet seventy years later this book is by far the best known of the Nobel of literature.

The narrator, Meursault, lives in Algiers which in this first half of the 20th century is still the prefecture of a French department. Insensitive to the world that surrounds it, this "pied-noir" has an unusual personality. The events of everyday life, the things of life do not really reach him and seem to slip on him like drops of rain on the feathers of a bird.

Stoic during the funeral of his mother, whom he refuses to see the body, compliant with the primary behaviors of his neighbors, ready to marry with his girlfriend Mary while he does not really love her, Meursault takes the life as she comes. Nothing really matters.

The day when on a beach Meursault shoots a young Arab with a menacing knife, "The stranger" suddenly plunges into the moving sands of absurdity.

The irrationality of a behavior always has the gift of exacerbating resentment, of articulating with force the vengeful arm of society; And justice with its great blinders to plunge into the breach, to be in tune with this absurdity.

Imperturbable at the bottom of his cell Meursault remains faithful to himself: remorse is not part of his moods.He accommodates himself  with the verdict of this pseudo-justice and even appreciates the indifference of the world towards him.

One does not emerge unscathed from a novel such as this one in which stupidity seems the thing best shared. Ten years after a first reading, I still close it today with a feeling of revolt against a world that too often for lack of will or vigilance lets itself go easy, falls into mediocrity.

This novel by Albert Camus with the title so justly chosen is one of those timeless works whose humanist message has a lasting impact on the collective unconscious.

To read "The stranger" is to take a step towards the other and it is already a lot!

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Paul G.