Albert Camus wrote a book called The Stranger. I looked him up online and the fellow has a definite Humphrey Bogart thing going on, which is of course spiffy. But I'm not sure about him otherwise. I do not understand him. I don't understand the style, the short sentences, the spare words, the character who does everything without life, without hope, without reason, without belief. How sad and meaningless is this nihilistic jerk and his pitiful life!
I await Mr. Grieser's thoughts on the novel and, in the meantime, relish this, the best quote in the whole book so far:
"I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored."
Camus was an odd bird. But I thought The Stranger summed up almost everything there is to know about the world we live in; people living entirely for themselves, yet with no pleasure in it, convinced that the universe is indifferent and that everyone else is as important as a squawking parakeet.
ReplyDeleteThat comment is a bird inclusio. Uh-oh.