December 12, 2022
I’m hesitant to write a review for a classic. It’s difficult to believe that I have something new to add to the already robust and intellectual deep discourse that exists around a world famous novel. That said, what follows is my take, and reflects only what I felt and discovered while reading.
Camus’ is a perfect example of a trend I’ve noticed in middle 20th century writing that depicts a protagonist as overwhelmingly passive. Meursault wanders about his own life, pushed along by his friends, his coworkers, his lovers, and even the government. Even at the moment of highest tension, the peak action of the novel, Camus writes Meursault’s clear choices as if they were both inevitable and of little import. This style captures a lack of agency and sense of hopeless forward motion you might expect from a Frenchman writing in the early 1940s. At the risk of sounding like a person who’s only read two books, I find it prescient of other mid-20th century writers, specifically Kurt Vonnegut’s existential sci-fi commentary on the nature of people and the ultimate zero-sum impact we have on our own lives in his novel The Sirens of Titan. I feel there can be a direct line drawn between Meursault’s apathetic ambling and Malachi Constant’s infantile struggle against the flow of fate.
Camus combines this passive and ambivalent voice with descriptions of north African heat that had me sweating and parched in the middle of November. The resulting effect is, honestly, rather unpleasant, but exceptionally effective. We feel the oppressiveness of the sun, and we start to believe Meursault’s reasoning that it was so hot, in fact, that perhaps violence was the only course of action.
7.5/10
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