Spark Notes The Stranger

Spark Notes The Stranger Review

I first read The Stranger (Albert Camus: L'Étranger) in French Literature class in school. I recently re-read it in English, specifically the first (and it would appear from much feedback, the best) English translation, by Stuart Gilbert (The Stranger). The quotations I have chosen below, and for the title above, are from that edition. This is a fairly important point; see Postscript at bottom.

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"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure."
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I found myself appreciating the book--for that matter, even Meursault's viewpoint on the world--much more now than I did as a teenager. Perhaps one needs a few years' worth of frustration (at bosses, and government, even traffic!) to get in the proper mood. Camus succeeds at asking, even in translated form, classic existentialist questions such as What are we doing with our lives? and Does anything really matter? The book could have easily been titled, "L'Ennui."

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"I learned that even after a single day's experience of the outside world a man could easily live a hundred years in prison."
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At just 150 pages, The Stranger moves along quickly. You could finish this in one evening's sitting, but the unease it leaves you with would last much longer. I recommend this short course in the Absurd, especially if you read it once (and moved on promptly) when you were young.

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"I decided that if ever I got out of jail, I'd attend every execution that took place."
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Not an uplifting book, this. Still glad to have rediscovered it. We'll see how I feel in another twenty years! On my way out to view the guillotine, let me add that I never realized how closely Seinfeld's Finale was based on the trial in Part Two here.

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"Is my client on trial for having buried his mother, or for killing a man?"
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Postscript: Amazon has combined the product listings so everything is listed together regardless of translation. Know that there are three English versions: Stuart Gilbert's classic from 1946, Joseph Laredo's little-known effort from the early 80s, and Matthew Ward's more recent Americanized version. Be careful and purchase the one you want.

Spark Notes The Stranger Overview

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Spark Notes The Stranger Specifications

The Stranger 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, apparently 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 fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given 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 Stranger, however, 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, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial'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 story'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 true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, 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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