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.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.