Rating: 
Summary: short but sweet, for the person reading the story anyway
Review: growing up, my last name was frequently misspelled as the author's last name. after 31yrs (no age jokes please), i figured it was time to read a piece penned by a man with whom i share many consonants and a vowel. i was not disappointed. mr. camus' story is easy to read and moves quickly (it's only 123 pages). mr. meursault is a man who seems to live his life on an even keel. he rarely feels or shows any emotion and other people find this odd. he seems indifferent when: his mother dies; his neighbor beats a woman in the apartment downstairs; his other neighbor abuses his dog; the woman in his life proclaims her love; the incident which lands him in trouble; and the subsequent debt he owes to society. the lack of passion and compassion in his psyche makes it impossible for people to understand his actions in the incident which lead to his trial. there is more to this but i won't spoil the ending for you.
Rating: 
Summary: AND FINALLY, THE STRANGER
Review: The Stranger might be a book that you've always heard about and never settled down to the actual joy of reading it. Now is a good time. It's fairly short weighing in at 123 pages but the awesome power of Camus' artistry is that he accomplishes exactly what he wants efficently. It is the story of Monsieur Meursault, an office worker in his 30's whose mother has just passed away. As the book opens he is travelling to the nursing home where she died. Much has been said of the coldness of the character but he feels guilt about his mother. Throughout the novel there are hints that he believes he killed his mother by putting her there. Meursault seems to have lost his connection with humanity. He behaves more like an automaton that a man. He goes to work, he makes friends, he has sex, but he does these things on automatic pilot. Who knows why he kills the stranger on the beach? Meursault would probably say "what difference did it make if I killed him or not?" Good and evil have become irrelevant to him. I do not see why on the back of the novel and in some reviews I have read it is said that he is drawn UNWITTINGLY into a senseless murder. I believe he did it to wake himself up from the big sleep he had sunk into. If he killed a man, it would prove he had an effect upon the world. He could wipe out a life. In these days when we have to put up with OJ and Timoty McVeigh, the trial scenes written in 1946 seem very prophetic of times to come. The lawyers are more interested in appearances and drama than they are in prosecuting or defending the accused. All you would have to do is include TV cameras in the courtroom scenes and substitute lethal injection for the guillotine and this novel couldve have been written in 2001. It would still have the haunting power. It is a beautiful book. I don't know if its one of the greatest ever, but it is great. One of the other disturbing images in here is an old man that lives in Meursault's building who owns this mangy looking mutt that he is always beating and cussing at. When the dog disappears the old man loses all purpose in his life. In his own way, he was showing love for the dog by torturing it. It's just another way of showing the lies we invent to hide the truth from ourselves. I think Meursault was the biggest liar of all. Brillant translation.
Rating:
Summary: el absurdo
Review: A veces al caminar por la calle yo también he sentido esa desazón, esa falta de raíces en el mundo y pese a tener padre y madre, hermanos y esposa, siento que no pertenezco a este mundo, que yo también como el personaje de Camus, soy un extranjero en este mundo, que solo estoy de paso y que no importa lo que haga para cambiarlo siempre será así y jamás será de otra forma. En esos momentos en los que tengo un ataque fuerte de abusurdismo, veo lo banal, y a veces es aún mas fuerte que la depresión, pues en las depresiones te preocupas por que la gente no te quiere, en estos momentos eso no te importa ya, nada te importa. Mucha gente lo achaca a la falta de Dios, a la falta de raices, a la falta de amor, sin saber que a veces los excesos de la vida pueden producir ese mismo efecto y quizás hasta mucho peor. Camus nos muestra en su novela a un hombre que no tiene afectos ni pasiones, un hombre que sin querer mata, y sin querer muere y todo alrededor, vida y muerte, esta imbuido del sentido del absurdo.Luis Méndez
Rating:
Summary: The depths of the human mind.....
Review: This is a very good book. A man finds himself awaiting an execution because of a situation he indirectly became involved in. While sitting in his cell, he reflects on how his life came to this point. I really like this book because it is written from a realist perspective. The man awaiting his death (I can't remember the character's name), isn't pleading for his life or talking about what he'll miss when he's gone. We all die eventually, and he knows its his turn. This book is very short, only 120 pages or so, and definately worth it.
Rating:
Summary: THE BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ
Review: A guy is determined to live an honest life and express his thoughts to the world. Because he does not lie at a trial for a murder he committed in self defence he is sentenced to death. Moral: if you choose not to engage in the elaborate game playing that is social life you will be .. punished. This book is generally praised for its presentation of philosophical issues and I like this dimenson too, but for me, it is the beautiful, sensorous depiction of a man focussed on each moment of life as it unfolds. Powerful and beautiful and written by a searing intellect.
Rating: 
Summary: 'de-philosophise' it
Review: Remove this book from the constraints of the ideological paradigm it has been placed in, either by its authour, or by subsequent intellectuals or book lovers, and see it as a story that happens every day amongst and between people in this modern world. Conformity, guilt before the trial, assumptions and presumptions, the multifacted nature of an action- no one truth but rather dependant on the angle and experience of the observer. This is what Camus's book offers to the modern reality. There is no discernable hero in this book- either one admires the main character for the 'realness' and truth of his actions and the envious unblemished connection that exists between his feelings and his words and deeds; or one pities him for not being able or willing to play the game of human and societal expectation. For in the end he is but the only one that really admires his propensity for raw honesty and individualism- or is he even capable of that? In the end he is not able to save himself from the prison sentence and is it not an even more horrendous act to be publicly castigated for a misread crime, than to somewhat compromise ones ideals and 'play the game' in an effort to be saved- to be free? Especially in this case where the main character's actions and apparent amoral position seems to be less of an honourable position and more the reality of a tired -almost broken -man. Maybe something was lost in the translation but I was not as moved by this book as I anticipated. Despite its existentialist label, it would still have been good for the book to leave you with some semblance of feeling that you had to search to find hidden meanings- the prose is simple (though not simplistic), and very transparent- but as i said- I think i may have expected a bit more.
Rating:
Summary: Is this book the existentialist bible? No.
Review: The other reviewers base their interpretation of this novel on the belief that Camus was an Existentialist and that Camus presented Meursault as a hero. Concerning the last point, nothing could be further from the truth. Before interpreting "The Stranger", one should first read Camus' essays on his own personal philosophy of "The Absurd" and how he relates it to the myth of Sisyphus. These essays reveal that Camus' personal philosophy was distinct from Existentialism in that he imagined that Sisyphus could be happy even though he was condemned to roll a huge stone up a hill in Hades only to have it roll down again on nearing the top. Similarly, Camus believed that people could be fulfilled by searching for the meaning of life even though they know they will not be able to discover it. Consequently, Meursault is not a hero in Camus' eyes because Mersault has given up trying to find meaning in his life and accepts without struggle the lack of emotion and spirit in it. In other words, don't trust everything that was written on the back cover of the american paperback edition of this novel. The back cover contained incorrect information that misled many readers, including myself, about the true meaning of this work. Read Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays" before interpreting "The Stranger" and new meaning will become apparent from this excellent and frightening novel.
Rating:
Summary: Existentialism at its finest!
Review: The Stranger was a summer reading assignment for my senior year of high school, and I devoured every word of it. Albert Camus should be read by every student of literature,history, and philosophy. His prose is fluid, his style uncompromising. He reflects the lack of definite meaning that life sometimes has. Camus earned his place in the French literary canon. It is time that the American literary canon adds him among their elite as well. I hope to read this novel again, but in French.
Rating:
Summary: The truth (as I see it)....
Review: Mersault is a "stranger" because his brain is not infected by the idea of morality. He allows neither the consequences of his actions or society's reception of them to affect his decisons. He indulges his every desire without question, and can go to the scaffold unrepentent, satisfied with his hedonistic, nihilistic life. Such a character, in this world as well as in literature, is regarded as insane or "evil" (a subjective word with no place in reality) because he does not restrict that which comes naturally to him. To those that condemn such a man, I ask "Why is he wrong/evil/insane/(insert dismissive label here)" The man he killed would have died anyway. There was nothing in nature, save the sharpened blade of moralizing men, to stop him from killing the man. Punishing him would not erase what was done. Weeping over a dead mother is pointless, and denying one's ... urges because the said dead mother expired earlier that day is equally irrational. So why is Mersault "wrong?" Answer: There is none. There is no objective way to determine the correctness of one's actions, and religion and government (the two distributors of judgment and retribution) are simply manmade institutions that are forged only of human opinions. One can allow the subjective morality of the majority to rule, or one can choose to be a god himself and allow his own opinion to be law. Mersault was such a man, and he died a hero's death. This was, of course, all my opinion. Nothing more. -Joseph "God" Jordan
Rating:
Summary: One of the 20 century's best novels
Review: Sparse prose. Simple plot. Short novel. That's "The Stranger" on the surface. But this book is so much more. The first half of the novel tells the story of disaffected man named Meursault and the absurd circumstances that lead to him casually killing a nameless Arab man on a beach. The second half deals with the absurdity of Meursault's circus-like trial for murder. Maybe the most telling aspect of the book is what Meursault, the story's narrator, chooses to omit. Readers get a better grasp on Meursault's worldview by what he *doesn't* dwell on or talk about. He is paradoxically an average person with average relationships and an average life and at the same time a cold-blooded murderer lacking typical human emotion and devoid of anything but the most casual of relationships. Meursault in many ways is a mirror of the society he is part of, and it is of little surprise that when his society puts him on trial for murder he is treated with the same casual indifference that he treated the man he killed. "The Stranger" is a beautiful book, a haunting book, a disturbing glimpse into the underbelly of modern society.
|
