The Stranger [Hardcover]

With the force of a parable and the excitement of a perfectly executed thriller,The Strangeris the work of one of the most engaged and intellectually alert writers of the past century.

Albert Camus's spare, laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in Algeria is famous for having diagnosed, with an almost scientific clarity, that condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. 

“The Strangeris a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and ­devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.” –from the Introduction by Peter DunwoodieBorn in Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus publishedThe Stranger–now one of the most widely read novels of this century–in 1942. Celebrated in intellectual circles, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.1

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours. That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

The old people's home is at Marengo, about eighty kilometers from Algiers, I'll take the two o'clock bus and get there in the afternoon. That way I can be there for the vigil and come back tomorrow night. I asked my boss for two days off and there was no way he was going to refuse me with an excuse like that. But he wasn't too happy about it. I even said, It's not my fault. He didn't say anything. Then I thought I shouldn't have said that. After all, I didn't have to anything to apologize for. He's the one who should have offered his condolences. But he probably will day after tomorrow, when he sees I'm in mourning. For nlƒ1