The Stranger
The Stranger by Albert Camus
I can't believe I didn't read this until after that clown George W. Bush did. Or that, knowing that it's honored in a song by The Cure (and I make no apologies for my musical taste!), it still took me so long to get to it. Actually, the reason I didn't read this book sooner is that I own it. I always read borrowed books first and I always have a lot of borrowed books, from friends and mostly, from the library. I bought this book and therefore it sat on my bookshelf all forlorn that I was never getting around to reading it. It's such a slim little volume, I should have taken the time to read it ages ago. I loved The Plague.
The Stranger is the story of a man, who tells his own story so matter of factly that he is easily misunderstood by the people who judge him. He is a Frenchman living in Algiers. He has a girlfriend and an okay job and a mother in a nursing home. Already he has people who judge him because of the nursing home situation. He couldn't care for the mother and so they arranged for her to go where she would be properly cared for, even if people thought he was callous for doing it. She was happy there, but he didn't go very often and that was another point against him. He's so dry and affectless that he easily comes off as being cold and distant and unfeeling.
Somehow he manages to get himself into untenable situations and without eliciting any sympathy, he will always come off as the villain. I can not do this work justice. It's cold and stiff and lacking in compassion, but these aren't criticisms, they are what makes this story unique and compelling. The main character's dissociation from society and his unemotional ways are more powerful today even than when the book was written. It's a treatise on 20th century society, but it says even more about life today in a lot of ways. Our cybercivilization and the distance between people that grows exponentially. These fringe people are becoming more the norm. The stranger may have just been ahead of his time.
