Meursault, a clerk in French Algiers, learns that his mother has died and attends the funeral without crying. The next day he goes swimming, starts a relationship with Marie and sees a comedy at the cinema. Soon after, he is drawn into a dispute involving his neighbor Raymond and, on a bright beach, shoots an Arab man. At his trial, the prosecution focuses less on the killing than on his lack of grief. Camus built the book as the central example of the absurd.
Readers who want a short introduction to existentialist thinking will find it here, told in flat first-person prose. It leaves you with unsettling questions about how society judges people who do not perform their emotions.
Deep, inward-looking, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Wisdom Collector. Which reader are you?
- ISBN
- 9788845247460
- Language
- IT
Quotes by Albert Camus
More →One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The Myth of Sisyphus
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
The Rebel
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
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