The Stranger | Albert Camus

This episode of Books for Men features The Stranger by Albert Camus. A classic literary novel about an ordinary man thrust into the face of absurdity—familial death, murder, and imprisonment. Listen for more!

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So just as I continued with the trend in the non-fiction segment of this month, I am going to do the same with the fiction segment of this month. So, I looked at a literary work of fiction The Road by Cormac McCarthy a couple of weeks ago, and this week I'm featuring a classic work, which is The Stranger by Albert Camus (Ka-moo). It's not Kay-mus. I know it looks like Kay-mus, but we got to try to pronounce his name correctly, not show our American ignorance. I did that a handful of times when I was in France this year. It's always funny to me, or interesting to me, I should say, how hesitant we are to try to speak another language in front of people who speak that language.

(01:04)

It's like we're almost embarrassed to try to say the words, even though there's a sense of appreciation that you're trying internally inside you, you're like afraid to do it because you're not pronouncing it the correct way most of the time. You really get a good appreciation for people who don't speak English well when they're speaking to you and the feeling that they may be having inside of them as somebody who doesn't speak the language as their first language. But anyway, it's not get bogged down on that. He is a French philosopher, author, and dramatist. He won the Nobel Prize in 1957 for his entire body of work. However, the stranger is actually his first novel, which is more like a novella because it's only 123 pages. But as you've probably heard me say in the past, don't let the length of the work fool you. It is extremely, extremely impactful for many reasons, which I will dive into shortly.

(02:07)

Another thing of note with this book is that it's actually a translated or of fiction. All of Camus's work was originally penned in French. And so this book has been translated numerous times by different translators. And the most recent publication was in 1989 by a translator named Matthew Ward, who did make some adjustments to the text for the translation that differ from the other ones. And that is kind of up for debate as well. There's probably no book that has a more famous first line than The Stranger, and that was actually adjusted in this Matthew War translation. In the book that I read, he said that his main goal for the new translation was to focus on what Camus wrote or what he said, and not the meaning of it. And so by focusing on what he actually said in the actual translation, it removes the translator from trying to depict the best way to convey the intent of the words, if that makes sense.

(03:15)

And it's more of a literal translation, although I never read another translation of this book, and I don't typically focus too much on this. I've thought about it a little bit. Obviously given this book I like on the surface, this style, I guess because it leaves the interpretation up to the reader, and with a work of this fashion, I think that that is really, really important. However, again, I don't really have much of a reference point because this is the only translation that I've read. And I will say that I've read this book twice. The first time I read it pretty quickly, so I wanted to read it a second time a little slower because there's a lot of meaning and there's a lot of subtlety that's compact into a very condensed set of words, right at 123 pages. You could read this book in an hour or two or an afternoon if you are a slower reader, and I just didn't want to miss anything.

(04:11)

So I doubled down and read it a second time. And to be honest, I'll probably read it again quite simply because it engages you in a thinking process that very, very few books are able to do, at least on such a deep level, and at least in my experience. So you're probably wondering at this point, what is the stranger about? Well, in a nutshell, it's about a man named Meursault who receives word that his mother has passed away, then he commits a murder, and then he is sent to prison. And yes, that's pretty much what happens on a plot level. So there are no surprises, there are no twists, there are no turns. And why am I ruining the entire plot for you? Because the book isn't about the plot. It's about the protagonist's reaction to these events, and more importantly, what that says about humans and the human existence.

(05:04)

And that's why you should read this book. Now, you don't have to agree with what the book says, but you should understand that the plot is only there to invoke a certain stand-in for a belief system that this author has in what is known as Absurdity. So his core belief is that man should just accept absurdity, right? And Absurdity meaning life's lack of meaning or our inability to understand what that meaning is, and we should just live with it. And so it's a very harsh way of understanding the world, but this book shows Meursault being faced with what would be absurd events, things that happen without any inherent meaning or happen without regard to any kind of logical or rational reasoning. They just happen to him. And how does he respond to this, and what does that say about humans and our larger human existence?

(06:08)

And perhaps one of the most interesting things is that, and it's almost like an exclamation mark on the life of Albert Camus, and his stance is that he died what some people would consider to be an absurd death. So he died in early death in a car accident at the age of 46, although he would probably say, don't try to construct meaning out of this because there is no meaning to it. So I know that this sounds sort of morbid and sort of sad and sort of deep and hard and challenging, and it is, but it doesn't go as far as nihilism, which would be rejecting generally accepted aspects of human existence, like knowledge and objective, truth and values and morality. It's just a potential philosophical viewpoint that one may have, may agree with, or may disagree with. The point of the stranger is to really evaluate this on a meta-level through a story.

(07:08)

I should be clear in saying that there are no big challenging, ornate, hard-to-read words in the text at all. In fact, stylistically, it's probably one of the more direct, declarative, straightforward styles of prose that you're ever going to read. And that really, really aids the text and the emotional level of the book, not because it's overtly emotional, because it's lacking emotion in a way, and that in itself holds a lot of weight as it pertains to the meaning of the story. So I kind of dangled a carrot earlier, and I forgot to close that loop. The translator of this book, Matthew Ward, he changed the famous first line of this story. And so the famous first line for many years in the translated version was “Mother died today.” And in his version, he left the French word for it from the original translation, which is “Maman died today.”

(08:12)

And there's a lot of debate around why this change was essential and yada, yada yada. For me, I think that whether you read it as Mother died today or Maman died today, the real importance of that line is exactly what I alluded to moments ago in the emotional relationship that he has, not just with his mother, but also the tone of the book and how upfront and emotionless this protagonist is while he's facing absurd events in his life. So I would be remiss, I guess is the right word, if I didn't share one quote with you, because it happens to be on my website. So obviously I find it to be very thought-provoking in a very interesting quote. And the quote goes, “She said, if you go slowly, you risk getting sunstroke, but if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church. She was right. There was no way out.”

(09:14)

And for me, this quote is as simple as that. Sometimes in life, you are presented with two options. Neither of them are good options, but you've got to do it anyway. So you just do it. And I like to believe that on the other side of that, there's a little more hope and there's maybe another set of options that provide a little bit more favorability. So I'll let you steal on that for a while. This episode is a wrap. I hope you enjoyed it. It was probably the deepest of all of the episodes in that the work really attempts to tackle some pretty lofty philosophical viewpoints. And for that reason, I think you should read it. And I really feel like this book will add to the depth of who you are as a human being and hopefully help you understand other human beings a tad bit better.

(10:08)

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