The Stranger

⚖The case for it

A telegram opens the book, three curt lines from a retirement home flattening a death into paperwork before the narrator has had time to react. What follows runs stranger and funnier than the reputation promises: at the funeral an old man keeps falling behind the procession and cutting across the field to catch up. At the trial Meursault feels like a gatecrasher at his own proceedings while the court quietly stops trying the killing and starts trying whether he wept at his mother's grave. The flatness is engineered, and Camus refused an early reader's push to soften it with adjectives; Sartre's account still holds, that "the sentences in The Stranger are islands." One reader calls it "a gentle punch in the face" that "eats away at you for weeks."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Meursault is "that guy who you always avoid at house parties," and the book locks you in with him for the duration. He will marry Marie, or anyone else who asks, which is the objection one reader states flatly: "People aren't interchangeable. At least not to me." His indifference reads to several as a model rather than a diagnosis, passive not-caring being precisely what lets harm proceed unchecked. The prose admirers call engineered strikes others as a school exercise, one reader wondering how the book "somehow shook the world of literature with this inane garbage." And the Arabs go unnamed, including the man he kills, a silence pointed enough that Kamel Daoud wrote an entire novel to give the dead man a family and a name.

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings