The Stranger
SynopsisPlot
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach.
Story
About this book
The Stranger follows Meursault, a French Algerian clerk whose story begins with the death of his mother. He receives the news with a flatness that unsettles the people around him, and his emotional detachment carries through the days that follow. In colonial Algiers, under heavy sun, he drifts through social encounters and a new relationship with little apparent feeling or direction. Events on a beach lead to a killing, and the second half of the book shifts to a courtroom where Meursault's character is put on trial as much as his actions.
Albert Camus published the novel in 1942 in French as L'Etranger. It is closely associated with his philosophical concept of the absurd, which concerns the tension between human desire for meaning and a universe that offers none. Meursault narrates in short, plain sentences that strip away the justifications and emotional performances people usually rely on. The effect is a voice that feels both honest and disturbing.
The setting of French colonial Algeria is central to the book. Camus was born in Mondovi (now Dréan) in northeastern Algeria in 1913 and grew up in Algiers. The coastal geography, the heat, and the social divisions between French settlers and Arab Algerians all shape the story's atmosphere and its moral landscape.
