Recommendations from our site
“It’s the story of a character called Meursault. One day, he’s on the beach, and he shoots a character called an Arab. They have no specific name—he was an indigenous person on the beach. A trial takes place and we realize that Meursault is facing what Camus calls the ‘nakedness of man faced with the absurd.’ He is floating about, really. He doesn’t show empathy. He doesn’t show remorse. Everything is absurd. The novel starts, in fact, with him just finding out his mother has died. He doesn’t seem to be mourning or grieving or expressing strong feelings. To me, it’s a very, very important book. It’s an allegory of Algeria and the colonial system, because lots of people in Algeria were behaving like Meursault, in a way.” Read more...
Xavier Le Clerc, Novelist
