Albert Camus The Outsider (1942)
Here's another one I probably should have made the effort to read thirty years ago, but better late than never, I suppose. The Outsider is the deceptively straightforward tale of an average man committing murder for no good reason, placed on trial, then sentenced to death. The prose - admittedly the translated prose - is tight and efficient, sticking to the basics without quite succumbing to the shorthand of a thriller. It passes along with so little drama that one begins to wonder what all the fuss has been about, where is the ponderous depth most of us will have anticipated? The revelation comes in the last few chapters as we recognise themes which, so it turns out, have been there all along.
Here's another one I probably should have made the effort to read thirty years ago, but better late than never, I suppose. The Outsider is the deceptively straightforward tale of an average man committing murder for no good reason, placed on trial, then sentenced to death. The prose - admittedly the translated prose - is tight and efficient, sticking to the basics without quite succumbing to the shorthand of a thriller. It passes along with so little drama that one begins to wonder what all the fuss has been about, where is the ponderous depth most of us will have anticipated? The revelation comes in the last few chapters as we recognise themes which, so it turns out, have been there all along.
I heard something that I hadn't heard for months. It was the sound of a voice; my own voice, there was no mistaking it. And I recognised it as the voice that for many a day of late had been buzzing in my ears. So I knew that all this time I'd been talking to myself.
The Outsider has been described as an existentialist novel, and its central figure is distanced from his own existence in much the same way as Nausea's Roquentin, but its thoughts are otherwise elsewhere. At the risk of sounding like Fred Flintstone attempting to get his head around A Brief History of Time, my reading is that the novel is about morality in the absence of God, or specifically how we relate to it, if at all, having decided that we're done with all the melodrama and gnashing of teeth undertaken for the sake of appearance. Meursault observes his own life and subsequent detention as though it's all happening to someone else, which Camus seems to propose is what is left once you subtract the hysterics, and what is left is faintly absurd because life is faintly absurd.
It's a quiet realisation, but its impact is significant once you realise what the book is doing; hence, I suppose, it's reputation as a classic.
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