The Stranger by Albert Camus

Spoilers ahead. And I’m not a literature scholar reviewing books for decades, so take this lightly.

Maman died today.

So opens one of the most popular books written in the 20th Century, as a message that I was quite puzzled by the first time I read it. I picked up the book at a Crossword store in Pune, en route to a hackathon. I thought to myself “I can read this when I get bored there.” I didn’t, thanks to a really interesting PS, but shelved the book in my bag only after reading the preface and the first line.
And the opening line kept ringing through my mind, not for how it has become a sacred cow in the literature world, or how the Translator Matthew Ward changed Mother to Maman for matching the intimacy of the original French word. No, I couldn’t stop thinking about it because I didn’t feel anything. My understanding fell short of my expectations, but I was interested enough to read it later. I collapsed with exhaustion back home and forgot The Stranger for some days, before I made a trip too long to scroll social media mindlessly.
So I grabbed the book in the fan’s spot on the MEMU’s train seat and began reading. And my god, did the first line make sense.

The book’s protagonist, for the lack of a better word, is Monsieur Meursault - a middle-aged office worker, living in Algiers (colonial capital of back when the French occupied what is today Algeria) whose mother dies as the book begins.
She lives in an old age home near Algiers and he has to take some days off, he has to got through the trouble of riding the bus there. He attends the funeral there and comes back finding the weekend off by coincidence.
I’m not going to summarize the plot verbatim but you can already see with my layman wording that something is off. And yet, Camus takes us to the halfway point of the novel with a masterful continuum of seemingly agreeable daily chores of Meursault. His neighbours are Salamano and his dog whom he abuses but loves deep down and Raymond, a man of bad reputation with whose case Meursault ends up as a witness. His hotshot love is Marie who he only loves for the time he spends with her. These characters, the beaches, the town of Algiers through Meursault’s lens is an arc. An arc so subtle in development that Meursault’s horrifying persona escaped my dumb self.
In termination of this first half of continuum, Meursault has killed an Arab at an Algerian beach, and is arrested thereafter. Mr Ward’s translation of the whole scene is superb, period.

The second half of the novel focuses on Meursault’s trial. I promise, I will refrain from describing it even in minor details as I have done the first half, beacuse you deserve it. Rest assured, Camus delivers.
The highlight of this part is the systematic dissection of this horror show that is Meursault. He finds that he does not believe in God, does not think he needs to be sad for his Mother’s death or doesn’t even express remorse for his apparent death. (I am sorry I couldn’t keep the promise.) He unleashes a rant on the priest who comes as his chamberlain near the end. He constantly complains about the weather and his discomfiture with the environment he’s in. And in the most nauseating manner of reasoning, he wishes to be greeted with cries of hate at the day of his public execution at the very end.
The whole trial, especially the prosecutor’s closing statement is an indictment of an unethically indifferent man. A man with a heart made of stone.

I read the whole book in one go and I can’t say for sure if I have a case for or against that. On one hand, I was left thinking at 9:15 PM in a lazy train “What the hell did I just read?” On the other, I admired this reminder Camus gave. The book is undoubtedly a masterpiece. Camus’ portrayals shine through Ward’s translation in a rare, preserving manner. In Camus’ own words, we witness “the nakedness of a man faced with the absurd”.
The Stranger is a persistent warning against the tendencies of us common people to accept the mundane. Camus is showing the terrifying other end of our defeat to monotony, as to what we might be turning ourselves into. I remember Jordan Peterson saying, that the glory of Dostoevsky over Nietzsche is that the latter is propositional but the former creates characters embodying those propositions. This makes Dostoevsky and here, Camus, brilliant.
I am not unique in saying that there is information overdose today. This might make you insensitive to some things close to you, unfeeling to people around you. Meursault is the big result of these small attributes.
I didn’t want this to sound a monochrome rant about him. I frankly liked the character more than some other protagonists I’ve read and I find him as a person I actually might have around me. But the dire state of his morality makes me sit stunned. Not because I am a philosopher of high intellect discussing morality, but because I am ordinary. And if not for the emotions we express, we run the risk of being strangers more.

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