The Stranger – Albert Camus

Rating: 5.5 stars

If I were more intelligent, I wouldn’t write reviews of classics. I guess this can’t really be that because the book is only a little less than 80 years old. But I should’ve thought of that before I reviewed One Hundred Years of Solitude!

The book is short, but it’s dense. I think it was about 30k words or so, maybe less. But it took me about as long as a regular book to read. It was one of the times that I was really grateful I was reading it on my own and not for high school because that sort of analysis (‘what is this a metaphor for’, ‘write a three-paragraph essay on the effect of the sun’) is the opposite of what made me really enjoy this book.

I mean, I could talk about the book and whatever, but you’d be better off reading stuff like actual analysis and the handy dandy introduction written in my copy of the book, that goes over the book and the context it was written, the philosophies, etc. So I’m just going to talk about what made it special for me.

I seemed particularly telling that a lot of the ‘absurdist’ things, such as the protagonist’s lack of emotion at his mother’s funeral, are accepted as normal or not seen as a black bark. Maybe it was like that back then too, and Camus was making a point? I suspect you don’t get called absurdist for not being absurd.

Also, it was the first book that really rings a bell with me and is a much better example of satire than a lot of modern authors. I wish I could find a modern author that I liked as much as this, and I didn’t even read this in the original language. Maybe I’m already a grumpy old man at 29 years old.