Review: The Stranger — the absurd, as a feeling first
★★★★★4.7 / 5.0 (editorial rating)
Verdict: the first book on Camus, with almost nothing to argue about. One short paperback, one afternoon, and the whole of his core idea delivered as an experience rather than a lecture. Read what "the absurd" feels like from the inside — through Meursault — before you ever read the word defined.
- Title
- The Stranger
- Author
- Albert Camus, tr. Matthew Ward
- Publisher
- Vintage International (this tr. 1989; original L'Étranger 1942)
- Length
- Novel · ~144 pp.
- Difficulty
- Beginner–Intermediate ★★☆ — reads in an afternoon; sits with you for years
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What it is — in three lines
Meursault, a young clerk in French Algiers, learns that his mother has died; he attends the funeral without weeping. Weeks later, on a glaring beach, he shoots an Arab man he barely knows — and at his trial it is his failure to grieve "correctly," as much as the killing, that damns him. Told in Meursault's own flat, present-tense voice, The Stranger is less a crime story than a portrait of a man who refuses to lie about what he feels — and of a society that cannot forgive him for it.
Why it can be your first Camus
The reason is the form. There is no philosophical vocabulary here at all — only a voice so plain and so honest that the strangeness creeps up on you. You read a man reporting sunlight, coffee, the sea, a cigarette, with the same even attention he gives to grief and to killing, and somewhere in that flatness you feel the ground go out from under the usual meanings. That sensation — the world's silence meeting our demand that it make sense — is what Camus later named "the absurd." Here you simply live it.
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger, opening lines
You can read it straight through like a story, yet you close it holding a question about honesty, feeling, and what society really punishes. For a book that carries so much philosophy, that ratio of readability to weight is almost unheard of.
Three highlights
1. The voice — Ward's spare American English
Matthew Ward's 1989 translation deliberately strips the earlier British version's polish, restoring the short, clipped sentences of Camus's French. The flatness is the point: it is the flatness that makes Meursault legible as neither hero nor monster, just a man who won't pretend.
2. The trial — condemned for not crying
The genius of the second half is that the prosecution barely argues about the shooting. It argues about the funeral — that Meursault didn't cry, smoked, drank coffee, saw a comedy the next day. He is convicted, in effect, for a failure of performance, and the reader is made to feel how much of social life is exactly that.
3. The ending — refusal as a kind of freedom
In the cell, facing execution, Meursault turns away from the chaplain's consolations and opens himself instead "to the gentle indifference of the world." It is bleak and, strangely, liberating: the first glimpse of the defiance Camus will call revolt.
What to watch out for
Two honest notes. First, the man Meursault kills is an unnamed "Arab," and modern readers rightly notice how the colonial setting renders the Algerian victim faceless; this is part of the serious debate about Camus and Algeria, which the Very Short Introduction takes on directly. Read the novel with that awareness, not around it. Second, resist the urge to reach immediately for the theory: the point of reading The Stranger first is to feel the absurd before The Myth of Sisyphus explains it. Let the story teach you before the essay does.
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