Aliens and Strangers: A Review of The Stranger by Albert Camus

Let us pretend that this book has not been the subject of a billion Freshman Literature papers.

When I picked The Stranger off its shelf at Borders, I picked a copy that was one among a long row of many copies of the same book. Even the cover, with its sharp dramatic black-and white needles is almost a trademark of Camus books. It's like J.D. Salinger's paperbacks. The book is so canonical that it gets stamped with a single, generic design and churned out for readers who want a copy cheap for college courses.

And then there were all the idealogical wars, where the world accused Camus of being an existentialist and he had to seperate himself from Sartre and make anti-existentialist claims.

Big deal. So now I, being a very casual reader who really doesn't enjoy reading about books or reading criticism, am in the position of writing about a book that most well-educated people have already written about back when they were in college.

But that's the point of this blog anyway. Not to provide a scholarly look but to talk mostly about how a book hit me, what sort of emotional life it entered into and what it said to me.

I think the reason The Stranger got its status is because, on a gut level, it's just so funny and relevant and insightful that people had to dissect it and name its parts.

The main character is a completely logical, honest guy faced with a bizarre world. And the system of how time progresses, how events happen, how relationships change, all conspire against the main character, who eventually must pay the price of violating the world's absurd norms.

I thought immediately of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Infinite Jest, and the film Idiocracy. There is hilarity and paradigm-shifting insight in entering the mind of someone unassuming, reasonable, and straightforward. We can't really understand how crazy our assumptions and norms are until we have someone like Camus come along and dissect them for us.

Part of the reason I love living and working with aliens is that they do this so naturally. "Gringo" behaviors are pointed out as such and ridiculed. Pretenses are recognized and ridiculed. And if something doesn't make sense, it gets noticed. And ridiculed.

It's good to get kicked around a little. It's good to have your absurdities pointed out. It's good to read books like The Stranger and think a little more humbly about who we are, how we all fit together, and what we take for granted.