The Stranger by Albert Camus

Genre: Fiction
Pages: audio
Challenges: 9 Books for 2009
New-to-me Author: yes




Simple Description:
I copied this from Amazon.com, they get full credit:

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Now what you really want to know....my thoughts:

To be blunt, I didn't like it. I think if I had read it with a group or in school where it would be discussed and picked apart, I might like it better. As it was, I read it on my own and was glad it was so short because it didn't take long to listen to it. I found the story rather boring. The main charactor is not driven and just goes with the flow, doesn't seem to have any emotion. I get that that is pretty much the point, but still, I didn't enjoy it. I suppose I should have expected this though. My husband has been on my case to read it for a long time and that's the only reason I did. Husband never reads, doesn't really get the point, yet he has a BA in English. So that's what I get for listening to him. haha!


This audio book was loaned from my local library.