After a year of Ulysses, it was a big relief to be reading a book with a narrative, even one as loose as The Stranger's. Translated from French by Sandra Smith, my pocket sized volume was a good accompaniment for my recent trip to Dublin, fitting snugly into my coat pocket as I retraced the steps of Leopold Bloom. The Outsider, also known as The Stranger, is a slice of life, philosophical insight into a young man's clearly neurodivergent indifference to the world around him. Living in French Algieria, Merusault attends the funeral of his mother, finds a girlfriend, gets involved with a morally compromised man, and eventually murders an Arab. The second half of the book involves his incarceration and trial, and is consequently less engaging than the first half.
I enjoyed the book (not difficult to do after Ulysses) and found it interesting how border characters in literature, like Meursault, Raskolnikov, and the protagonist from Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, are probably just autistic. Because Merusault does not show any emotion at his mother's funeral, refuses to tell his fiance that he loves her, or submit himself to a higher power, the other characters in the novel cannot understand him. Blase about his own fate, the protagonist values cold, clinical logic above all else, even when it means admitting to things that work against his best interests. By the end of the book, we are very much given the sense that he is on trial not for the murder of the Arab, but for not crying at his mother's funeral. It reminded me greatly of Pink Floyd's 'The Trial.'
Rating: 3/5
No comments:
Post a Comment