A review by chery
The Stranger by Albert Camus

dark slow-paced

5.0

From the moment I picked up this book, I never found it boring. Reading other reviews, I realized it's not everyone’s cup of tea—some people just don’t get it, but I do. It resonated with me, especially in how it led me to question my own life and in how I found myself agreeing with the main character’s final reflections on life and the years stolen from him: It didn’t matter whether we die today or tomorrow when there’s no one you truly treasure or who understands you.

I hope this doesn’t suggest that I’m straying from my faith, as I’m a devoted believer. I’d like to think that I'm just going through a quarter-life crisis. I see this novel as capturing the life of an atheist (nihilist?) forced to confront the life he lost, to feel remorse and regret, and to cherish the precious moments he could never fully embrace—but couldn’t bring himself to do. Reading this book while dealing with depression might seem fitting, though I strongly advise against it. 

Some passages in the final chapter hit me like a truck, and I want to keep them here for posterity. This may contain spoilers. 

How was I to know, since apart from our two bodies, now separated, there wasn’t anything to keep us together or even to remind us of each other? Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. I wasn’t interested in her dead. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with me. I wasn’t even able to tell myself that it was hard to think those things.

He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out that it was the former that had condemned me. His response was that it hadn’t washed away my sin for all that.

I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he.

Sounds of the countryside were drifting in. Smells of night, earth, and salt air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me.

For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a “fiance,” why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.