Book: L’Étranger
Apr. 20th, 2009 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseL’Étranger, titled The Outsider in this English edition, was quite a straightforward short read and amusing for the most part. It’s the sort of short novel that states the obvious in a rather guileless fashion that translates as fairly humorous. Its entire story is a case of disenfranchisement and self-fixated isolation taken to the logical extreme without curtailing itself due to the dictates of human society. It reaches the logical conclusion too which would be the case in any situation where an individual living under the rules of Leviathan chooses not to absorb those rules of conduct.
Overall it wasn’t a bad read but I maintain that anybody who finds it to contain a life changing revelation is an idiot. Then again that’s most likely why it was written: to spell out the obvious for individuals who can’t figure it out for themselves.
Also: the related Cure song
"He then asked me if I wasn’t interested in changing my life. I replied that you could never change your life, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t at all dissatisfied with mine here."
(p. 44)
"I wasn’t interested in her any more if she was dead. I found that quite normal just as I could quite well understand that people would forget about me once I was dead. They had nothing more to do with me. I couldn’t even say that this was hard to accept."
(p. 111)
"I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy."
(p. 117)
- Camus, A. 1983. The Outsider. London: Penguin Books.
Overall it wasn’t a bad read but I maintain that anybody who finds it to contain a life changing revelation is an idiot. Then again that’s most likely why it was written: to spell out the obvious for individuals who can’t figure it out for themselves.
Also: the related Cure song
"He then asked me if I wasn’t interested in changing my life. I replied that you could never change your life, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t at all dissatisfied with mine here."
(p. 44)
"I wasn’t interested in her any more if she was dead. I found that quite normal just as I could quite well understand that people would forget about me once I was dead. They had nothing more to do with me. I couldn’t even say that this was hard to accept."
(p. 111)
"I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy."
(p. 117)
- Camus, A. 1983. The Outsider. London: Penguin Books.
