The Stranger
Meursault's flat affect in the face of a murder conviction and death sentence captures something genuinely unsettling about consciousness disconnected from meaning. Camus published it in 1942; Le Monde later ranked it first among the 100 greatest books of the 20th century. The purest literary expression of absurdism, and brief enough to read in a single afternoon.
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 case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
