Book Review: The Stranger

The Stranger by Albert Camus is a book that I would not necessarily have picked up. In fact, I did not pick it up. My wife, Bernadette, selected this book to meet a Modern Mrs. Darcy reading challenge quest. I was asked to read a book recommended by someone with great taste. I am quite confident in Bernadette’s taste and looked forward to the surprise. It was certainly a surprise.

Camus initially wrote The Stranger in 1942 in French. The book had won a Nobel Prize in literature in 1957. The copy that I read is 123 pages long and has two parts with five to six chapters each. The setting for this book is in a town in Algiers.

My impression of this book is that it is a dark book. It follows the life of a man who is convicted of murder. What should normally be a case of self-defense received a harsher sentence based on perceptions from people who did not like how the man acted and responded.

The man, in my opinion, was an empty shell just going through the motions of day-to-day life. The story begins when the man had to travel because his mother had passed away. He had to see to her funeral arrangements. Even at the beginning of the story, people were talking about the fact that he was not caring for his mother and how he acted while waiting for the funeral to take place. The people around him reacted to what they saw not what they knew. The man was exhausted because he had gotten very little sleep. He was not as engaged as they assumed he should be.

As the story continued one got to see different people in his life and his interactions with those people. Decisions he made to help out different people and how he felt about those decisions came back to haunt him. What should be a case of self-defense turned into a murder trial.

The perceptions of people around him and his seeming lack of care helped to escalate the final verdict.

In the end, I’m not really sure what to think about The Stranger. I found it fascinating in a disturbing kind of way. But I’m not sure if I really liked it. But I’m not sure if I didn’t like it. It certainly was a book to think about. This is what I believe a good book should do. I don’t know.

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mitmensch0812/2513316191

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