"The Outsider" by Albert Camus

Another novel with a stunning first line: “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.” Mersault, a Frenchman living in Algeria, reacts to the death of his mother with what, to all the world, seems like a total lack of emotion. Having attended the funeral he goes back to work, meets and beds a girl, helps an old man who has lost his dog, and intervenes in a neighbour's domestic dispute with fatal consequences.

It is written in short, matter of fact sentences that feel like the stunned bewilderment of a man who confesses that physical sensations in the here and now interfere with his feelings, and who is too honest with himself to subscribe to the 'normal', socially acceptable and socially constructed, emotions of others.

But society can't tolerate someone like Mersault, someone who sees through the pageant that we like to pretend is reality.

Divided exactly into two parts by the killing, The Outsider is a perfect miniature portrait of an emptied soul.

Selected quotes:

•  “But today the sun blazing down upon the shimmering landscape made it inhuman and depressing.” (p 14)
• “I felt a bit lost standing between the blue and white of the sky and the relentless darkness of these other colours: the sticky black of the blistering tar, the dull black of the morning clothes, the shiny black of the hearse.” (p 15)
• “Although actually, everyone is always a little guilty.” (p 18)
• “I thought that it was one more Sunday nearly over and done with, that Mama was now dead and buried, that I would go back to work, and that when all was said and done, nothing has really changed.” (p 22)
• “when all is said and done, no one really knows.” (p 25)
• “I replied that you can never really change your life and that, in any case, every life was more or less the same and that my life here wasn't bad at all.” (p 38)
• “Out in the street the sun was already so hot that ... it felt like a slap across the face.” (p 43)
• “All I could feel was the sun crashing like cymbals against my forehead, and the knife, a burning sword hovering above me.” (p 53)
• “I fired for more times into the lifeless body, where the bullets sank without leaving a trace. And it was as if I had rapped sharply, four times, on the fatal door of destiny.” (p 54)
• “Their muffled whispers, rising from below, created a kind of soft background music against the conversations that criss-crossed above their heads.” (p 66)
• “I didn't understand how the natural qualities of an ordinary man could be turned into overwhelming proof of his guilt.” (p 91)
• “I knew that it didn't matter much whether you died at thirty or at seventy, because in either case other men and women would of course go on living, and it would be like that for thousands of years.” (p 103)
• “He wasn't even sure he was alive because he lived life as if he was dead.” (p 109)
• “standing before this symbolic night bursting with stars, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world.” (p 111)

I devoured this book. The aching honesty of the protagonist was devastating.

Camus also wrote The Plague, The Fall and The Myth of Sisyphus

December 2017; 111 pages

Accolades

The Outsider was judged by the readers of Le Monde to be the most memorable book of the twentieth century.

Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Works by other Nobel laureates that are reviewed in this blog can be found here.

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Plague" by Albert Camus

A doctor in the Algerian city of Oran notices rats dying in the streets. Before too long, he and his colleagues are recording mysterious deaths. When the authorities realise that there is bubonic plague in town they seal off the city. Immediately, people are cut off from their loved ones, the doctor from his wife who is being treated for TB in a sanatorium; the only communication allowed being the telegram. And in the sealed off city, the death toll rises.

The reactions of the doomed inhabitants is recorded faithfully (not so faithful is the medical details; by the time of the setting it was known that bubonic plague isn't spread from person to person so quarantine is unnecessary and there were reasonably effective anti-plague serums). The narrative concentrates on a small group of acquaintances:

• Dr Rieux who keeps plugging away at his job despite that he never heals anyone and the prophylactic measures he applies are of doubtful use;
• Cottard who attempts suicide before the plague strikes but then flourishes on the fringes of the black market and the people smuggling trade;
• Rambert who spends much of his time trying to find a way to escape the city;
• Grand the clerk who has been repeatedly denied promotion and whose hobby is to write a novel whose first sentence he endlessly repolishes;
• Tarrou who is the secular conscience of the group;
• Father Paneloux the priest who, in a hell-raising sermon, tells the people that the plague is punishment for their sins (he likens the city to Sodom) although he dilutes this later after watching an 'innocent' ten year old boy dies

and there are a host of thoroughly believable minor characters as well. Although there are no Arabs. None at all. They don't even die.

Camus has a brilliant dead-pan style. He writes journalism although the point is to explore morality.  The full horror of the pestilence is given through the small details: the cinemas are full although they only have the same films which they show again and again; prison warders who die are recommended for the military medal but the military authorities object so a plague medal is proposed instead but it doesn't work because it is too easy to get. And I loved the explanation of the various ways in which a bureaucrat can say no.

This is a beautifully written and thought-provoking novel. But why no Arabs?

Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Works by other Nobel laureates that are reviewed in this blog can be found here.

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God