This was a short story about a man who seemed to float through life mostly detached. You could almost say a stoic not by philosophy but by personality. Most things that attach people to this life didn’t seem to be there for him. A French man living in colonialized Algiers. Meursault is like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. He tells the truth, but instead of having a good heart, Meursault’s heart seems indifferent. Written by Albert Camus while Hitler occupied France, this book places the character in the most extreme of human situations. Meursault and the reader are forced to realize they are condemned to death and to try to find a way to enjoy the time they have in the face of absurdity and meaninglessness. I liked this book because just when you think you have a handle on it you remember a new detail that makes you look at it from a different angle. It is similar to no country for old men in that sense and in the fact that the ending leaves it up to the reader to write the conclusion. This book was not written from a place of answers, the character is just as clueless as the reader. That is valuable and leaves it open to many interpretations. Camus had this one sentence summary:
“I summarized ‘The Stranger’ long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”
In the end I couldn’t get myself in the same headspace as the character and so his conclusion seemed unconvincing, but his thoughts on the guillotine were brilliant.
“For by giving it some hard thought, by considering the whole thing calmly, I could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none. The fact was that it had been decided once and for all that the patient was to die. It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on. If by some extraordinary chance the blade failed, they would just start over. So, the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time. And I say that’s wrong. And in a way I was right. But in another way, I was forced to admit that that was the whole secret of good organization. In other words, the condemned man was forced into a kind of moral collaboration. It was in his interest that everything go off without a hitch.”
Albert Camus