Tabs & Twists
The Stranger
After his mother's funeral, Meursault drifts through the sun-baked days of Algiers until an arbitrary act of violence puts him on trial.
- Genre
- Literary fiction
- Setting / Period
- Colonial Algeria
- First published
- 1942
- Pages
- 123
- Language
- English
Review
Meursault buries his mother without tears, goes swimming the next day, starts an affair and later kills a man on a beach, almost as if by accident. The trial that follows is less about the crime than about his refusal to perform the emotions society expects.
Camus writes in a flat, short-sentenced style that makes Meursault's detachment both disturbing and oddly honest. The book is the most famous literary expression of the absurd: a world with no built-in meaning, and a man who decides to face that without lying.
It is brief and sparse, and it reads quickly, but it leaves a lot of questions behind. The final pages, in the cell, are some of the most memorable in twentieth-century fiction.
