The Outsider by Albert Camus, translated from the French by Joseph Laredo
London: Penguin Books, 2000 (first published as L'Etranger in 1942, this translation first published 1982)
ISBN: 0141182504
Do we value Camus enough? I know that his books are very popular, and there is a lot written about him, but have we fully realised how accurately he predicted the society of today? Re-reading The Outsider is a reminder that modern life is alienating to individuals and fosters alienation of individuals one from another.
Meursault is a modern man - unattached, lacking passion, an outsider in his own life, observing and going along, but with no sense that he is able to take charge or direct his own life. When his girl Marie asks if he loves her, he states "it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." When she asked if he wanted to get married, "I explained to her that it really didn't matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married. Anyway, she was the one who was asking me and I was simply saying yes."
Camus sets up this book as portraying Meursault as someone who is completely truthful, and a person whose truthfulness leads to his downfall (Camus states as much in an afterword that is included in this edition). It is true that Meursault refuses to commit the daily niceties that most of us expect - he doesn't conform to the norms of crying at his mother's funeral, or saying what might be expected when his elderly neighbour loses his dog. This is all well and good, but the cold-hearted (a better term would be heartless) murder that is the centre-piece of this story is impossible to gloss as part of a wider story of truthfulness in the face of a conformist society. Meursault can't understand why people seem so agitated about his lack of remorse or feeling for what he has done, but Meursault seems oblivious to the scale and finality of the crime he has committed.
This tension, deliberate or not, infects the mind of anyone who reads this book. Meursault's depiction of the banality and conformity of society is valid, but his inability to understand that what he has done draws the calumny of that same society is almost impossible for the reader to accept. The constant fug that Mersault describes living through (he is always too hot and stuffy, the sun addles his brain, he feels slightly sick) adds another layer of wooliness to the story - the reader feels that at any moment they might be suffocated by this novel, that the helplessness and hopelessness of Meursault will overwhelm even the society that sits in judgement of him.
In 2023, one also wonders about the racial aspect to this book. Meursault's "mate" Raymond beats his Arab girlfriend, the sister of the Arab that Meursault kills. Raymond gets off the charge of violence, with the implication that because he beat up an Arab woman it doesn't matter so much. The reader gets the sense that Meursault wonders why he has been given the death penalty, given that the person he shot was merely an Arab. In 1942 this aspect of The Outsider may have not been as noteworthy as it is today, but it adds another layer to what is already a dense story.
The style of this book (in this translation) is worth mentioning as well. The first two chapters, which set up what kind of man we are dealing with, his attendance at his mother's funeral and describing his daily life, are masterpieces of descriptive writing. The horror that develops in the second half of the book - horror at Meursault's crime, horror of his helplessness, horror of what is going to happen to him - is well-handled also.
There is no doubt that Camus is worth reading - I do wonder if The Plague might be a better starting point for the first-time Camus reader, but The Outsider, although a short book, definitely lingers in the mind.
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