The Stranger by Albert Camus


There’s an episode of Seinfeld where George is so insecure that his new girlfriend, Cheryl (cousin of Ping), will think that Jerry is funnier than he is, that George convinces Jerry to act somber around her.

So when Cheryl mentions over dinner that it’s her aunt’s birthday, Jerry sighs and says, “Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it's not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably. Irrevocably. Happy birthday? No such thing.”

That line, Jerry’s bid to not be funny, pretty much sums up the plot of Albert Camus’s The Stranger.

The story begins with Meursault, a young Algerian man, whose mother has just died. ("Maman is dead.") He falls asleep during the vigil, remembers very little of her funeral, and is happy to return to Algiers. Once there he rather inadvisably begins to help out his friend, Raymond, seek revenge on Raymond’s ex-mistress, an Arab woman. Events escalate. The mistress’s brother, apparently not pleased that Raymond has slapped around his sister, follows Meursault and Raymond to the beach, and, along with a friend, instigates a fight. The fight ends when Raymond is hurt and retreats. Meursault later returns to the beach, and for no reason at all, Meursault shoots the Arab man, and is subsequently carted off to jail.

Originally written in French, The Stranger was translated in to English by Matthew Ward. In his foreword, Ward explains that Camus had intentionally been copying American writers, like Hemingway and Faulkner, when writing the book. Particularly in the first half of the book, the sentences are short and stilted, and the protagonist, Meursault, is hardboiled (what P.G. Wodehouse would have called “a twenty-minute egg”).

I could have told Camus that this was not the way to go. (Well, you know. If I’d been alive at the time he wrote the book, and if I spoke French.) It’s a lesson that writers of commercial fiction learn early on – you simply can’t copy another writer’s voice. It always rings false. And that’s certainly true in The Stranger.

But if you manage to slog your way through the tedium of the first half of The Stranger (excruciatingly boring details about Meursault’s neighbors, and meals, and having to listen to Meursault drone on to his girlfriend that love is meaningless, life never changes, blah blah blah blah blah), there is an unexpected surprise waiting for you: part two actually gets better. Much better. The story perks up, and you even learn the reason for much of the dull minutiae from part one.

The book peters out again in the end – prepare yourself for a final chapter where Meursault gnashes his teeth about the unbearable nothingness of being – but at least at that point you have something invested in Meursault’s story.

I’d round out the book’s grade to a B-: Act One is dreadful, Act Two is excellent, with a disappointing finale.

 

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