Camus' The Stranger

L'Etranger (The Stranger, also translated as The Outsider) is the first novel of Albert Camus, published by Gallimard in Paris in 1942, during the German occupation. Its narrator, Meursault, is a clerk in French Algiers who attends his mother's funeral without outward grief, begins a relationship the next day, and soon after kills an unnamed Arab man on a sunlit beach. The second half follows his trial, where he is judged as much for his lack of emotion as for the crime.¹³

Camus was born in 1913 in French Algeria to a poor family, and he worked as a journalist before turning to fiction. He conceived the book as a work of the 'absurd', his term for the clash between human demand for meaning and a silent world, and he published his essay The Myth of Sisyphus in the same year as its companion. The prose is short, plain and sparing, and Meursault tells the story in the first person with little reflection. Jean-Paul Sartre praised it in a 1943 essay, which helped link Camus with existentialism, a label Camus disliked.¹⁴

The Stranger was an immediate success and became one of the most widely read French books of the century; it has been translated into dozens of languages. Camus received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, and he died in a car accident in 1960. The novel has drawn debate about its treatment of colonial Algeria: in 2013 the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud answered it with The Meursault Investigation, giving the dead man a name and a brother who tells his story.²³