Rating: 
Summary: Very Good Place to Begin
Review: Because other reviewers have very nicely outlined Camus' philosophy and the common themes of Existentialism, my comments will focus on the reading this book against the background of Camus' other works. As I mentioned in the "title" of this review, The Stranger is a good place to begin one's reading/study of Camus. I say "study" because if one is looking for a light read and a great plot, Camus isn't the best author to pick up - he writes for an audience that is interested in feeling the way he does about lives we live and the emotions we confront if/when we come to realize that we have to look to ourselves for meaning. In this respect, then, Camus writes classic works of what some call "Existentialist Fiction" which are basically philosophical-as-fiction rather than fiction-as-fiction (i.e. fun fiction with little or no point - and a happy ending, for that matter). What also follows from this is that reasonable people will differ as to how Camus is to be properly interpreted, as some of the surrounding reviews demonstrate. For those who are looking to try some Camus for the first time, this is a great place to begin. Subsequent to his death, A Happy Death was published, which Time Magazine commented "May be read as a preamble to The Stranger," because Camus wrote A Happy Death first and never published it. I did this very thing, but upon further reflection, however, I have decided that such was a mistake. If Camus meant for us to read A Happy Death first he would have published it himself. I suggest that The Stranger is the place to begin. At any rate, the book is a wonderful short piece of Existentialist fiction, and well worth one's time (even if you hate it you can say you've read some Camus and sound smart).
Rating: 
Summary: Deeply affecting work about a completely detached man.
Review: After reading this book in high school, I wrote an essay about what it would be like to spend the day with Mersault, the completely unsympathetic, detached main character of this novel. My essay had him doing many of the things he did in the book, going to the beach, eating, messing around with his girlfriend and completely ignoring everyone around him. I understood, sympathized with the character and, to my shock and horror, identified with what Mersault was going through.Are we truly alive if we exist only to please ourselves, if no one else matters to us and we, in turn, matter to no one else? Is empathy a necessary aspect of humanity? In the second half of the book, Mersault's situation teaches him to care for others, to care about how his own actions (primarily the killing of the Arab, which he did because the sun was in his eyes and because he was annoyed) affect the people and the world around him. He learns to weep for himself, as his death approaches he sees how little his life matters, because of the way he conducted it. The first sentence of the novel is key. "Maman died today - or maybe yesterday." The sentence speaks to how little anyone, even his own mother, mattered to Mersault. People in his life were just there to provide means to an end. That she's dead is an annoyance, taking him away from other things he'd rather be doing. It's very, very sad. He's a "stranger" because he doesn't care to know anyone - not because no one knows him.
Rating:
Summary: very existential
Review: the previous review just got me riled. the whole thing about existentialism is that it's the philosophy of no philosophy, "existence precedes essence," etc. life is implicitly meaningless, the individual honestly confronts the abyss and creates his/her own meaning. as kierkegaard wrote, "all truth is subjectivity." meurseault is the quintessential existential character because he exists "beyond good and evil", in the "teleological suspension of the ethical", and ignores established morality. basically, any individual philosophy that is honest and stays true to concrete facts, without dreaming up alternative realities but rather confronting the present, is existential. and this book is very that. in a realm where "god is dead", the individual is everything: the foundation of a new ethical standard. any true existentialist wouldn't call themselves "existential", since it's not a category. it's the category of those that refuse categorization.
Rating:
Summary: Psychology of Alienation -- Nice New Translation
Review: I'm a psychologist, so I especially like this book for Camus' portrait of psychological alienation from society. Also, I thought I might not like having a new translation of this classic text, but I find I do like it. Camus was influenced by Andre Gide, and I think Gide's Immoralist and his Lafcadio's Adventures both complement the psychological themes in Camus' stranger, so I pass those recommendations along. If you get into the Stranger, reading Camus' earlier draft version of his first novel, published as A Happy Death, is an interesting undertaking that I enjoyed.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling Classic of Extreme Disillusionment
Review: I took upon myself to read L'etranger(that's French for those in the unaware) after seeing the glowing recommendations of others on Amazon and countless people listing it prominently in their Listmania lists. I had read similar books containing a highly disenchanted and disjointed protagonist such as A Clockwork Orange and Fight Club(both excellent works). However, The Stranger, albeit a short work, adds more fuel to the fire of disillusionment in the person of the enigmatic and mysterious Meursault. Camus galvanizes this novella noir with his uncanny use of existentialism to bring attention to the smells, sights, and sounds of the beach and the countryside and Meursault's oneness with nature and conversely his nothingness with God. The Stranger proves incredibly unconventional and simple, yet paradoxically complex and compelling. There are times when I wanted to shake the catatonic Meursault and shout, "Wake up!!" It seems as if he's almost stoically sleepwalking through life and his highly questionable decisions. He proves totally devoid of conscience and emotion - enigmatic and remorseless to the end. Worth a read - unlike any other work of fiction you will ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Worth the Nobel Prize
Review: The Stranger is worth reading once, but only once. Unlike a truly great novel, it does not merit re-reading at different passages of life. The style, as spare as Hemingway's but even less resonant, has no extensive passages of lyric beauty; the characters, even the eponymous protagonist, remain essentially ciphers, dim images about whom the reader can scarcely be compelled to care; even the existentialist theme was more vividly communicated in Camus' essay "Le Mythe de Sisyphe". The Stranger is gratifyingly brief, and it is only this brevity that saves it from being banal. In almost precisely the same manner as the dramas (?) of Beckett, this novel is deemed valuable not by anything contained within it, but by the protracted labors of a half century of existentialist afficionados, in both the literary establishment and Academia, who were marked by the absurdist ethic in some inchoate fashion that was unigue to their times. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Mutually Assured Destruction, gave existentialist questions an intellectual cachet that struck a certain chord in a 1950's America essentially middle-brow in its cultural aspirations (much like Zen with the contemporaneous Beats), but the absurd hero has less to say to a world that worships the new gods of the global marketplace. The novel is not particularly realistic, more like the hazy dream of an opium smoker than a genuine portrayal of reality. What defense attorney, or judge, would allow the defendant's behavior at his mother's funeral to be entered into evidence at a capital trial? This element of absurdity or ridiculousness emphasizes the theme, but it also transmutes The Stranger from a novel into a fantasy, an unrealistic fable with a doctrinaire, existentialist moral. If you want to read something Kafkaesque, read Kafka.
Rating:
Summary: David's thoughts
Review: The stranger is about a man who has no emotion and is indifferent to the world. In the beginning, the man's mother dies, and he doesn't show any feelings. Next, he meets a girl but won't tell her that he loves her. Later, the man kills an Arab on a beach and is put in prison. While in his trial the man is bored and is eventually sentenced to have his head cut off. While waiting for his execution, he tells the chaplain that he doesn't believe in God and never will. The book ends with him in prison, waiting hopelessly for his execution.
I did not particularly like this book. It is boring to read a book when the character has no emotion. I also thought that there wasn't enough action and that the ending was pointless.
Rating: 
Summary: The Stranger...
Review: The book begins with the death and funeral of Monsieur Mersault's mother. The man is not really affected by the death and goes on living life as he did while she was still living. The weekend after the funeral Mersault ran into a lady who used to work at his office and they went swimming together. Mersault and Marie ended up going to a movie and spending a lot of time together. Raymond invited Mersault up to his room to talk and have dinner. That night, M. Mersault ended up writing a letter to Raymond's old girlfriend who had cheated on him. Her brother, an Arab, had been following Raymond and watching everything he did. One day, Raymond, Mersault and Marie went to one of Raymond's friends' bungalow on the beach. The Arab and two of his friends followed them there. The three men went for a walk and ran into the Arabs. They had a fight and Raymond left with a cut lip and arm. Later on that same day, Mersault decided to go out for another walk. He ran into the Arab man once more. This time, however, Mersault used the revolver that Raymond had given him for the earlier fight and shot the man five times. He was arrested and taken to jail. M. Mersault told his lawyer that he would not lie to the court and he never showed remorse for what he had done. Eleven months later, the judge sentenced him to death. The chaplain tried to talk him about God, but the man decided that there was no point to life and he didn't believe in God anyways. He knew that he lived his life for his afterlife and waited for the day of his execution to come.
I thought this book was good. It would not have been my first choice to read, but it came out alright in the end.
Rating:
Summary: The Outsider
Review: "The Stranger" is a pleasant breeze in literature but an endless moral debate. .
Whatever the conclusion might be, I've never read a book so simple, so smooth, so easy to read and yet so surprisingly difficult to dissect. The social, philosophical, psychological and moral questions posed are disturbing and nothing short of brilliance. I'm sure there have been books reviewing "The Stranger". But each of us can still see it differently through our own lenses! Enjoy (even if it is just an English translation!..)
Rating:
Summary: The Outsider
Review: ... "The Stranger" is a pleasant breeze in literature but an endless moral debate. The afterthoughts never cease years after I finished reading. ...
Whatever the conclusion might be, I've never read a book so simple, so smooth, so easy to read and yet so surprisingly difficult to dissect. The social, philosophical, psychological and moral questions posed are disturbing and nothing short of brilliance.
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