Completed this book at Dubai airport, during transit. Off late I have been doing a lot of reading at the airports, and I find a kind of placid calm.
I would recommend the book to anyone and everyone who reads, just for the sake of it. Nope, I wouldn’t guarantee, whether one would like it, but would definitely find it interesting. By the way Albert Camus is the youngest Nobel Laureate in Literature. Read it for this if nothing else.
The novel tells the story of Meursault, who essentially wears an indifferent attitude, to everything else, other than his immediate needs. Even when he is attending his mother’s funeral, or seeing her for the last time after she died, he is more concerned about his sleep. He feels wretched not because of pangs of pain owing to his mother’s death, rather because he is physically tired, as he has been deprived of sleep for long. During the next few days, he has sex with his former girlfriend, he befriends his neighbour, and eventually ends up killing a guy. Meursault is incapable of felling remorse, and it is this attitude of his, which makes him “The Outsider” or “The Stranger”. The argument follows that if Meursault is incapable of remorse, he should be considered a dangerous misanthrope and subsequently executed to prevent him from doing it again, and making him an example to those considering murder. The novel is an English translation from it’s original version in French titled, L’Étranger.
After a little research it was interesting to find that Camus is considered to be one of the prominent supporters of Absurdism, which probably he himself would have denied. But the philosophy he ended up professing, was given to be close to Absurdism.
It’s strange the feeling or the thought, the word Absurdism, evokes in you. Absurdism, according to some is a philosophy stating that the efforts of humanity to find meaning in the universe will ultimately fail because no such meaning exists, at least in relation to humanity. It was born of the Existentialist movement (of which I would like to research later).
As far as my understanding goes, Camus wants to highlight the fallacy of the world we are living in. The façade we create so as to be a part of it. Meursault on the other hand refuses to compromise with the truth. He would not display an emotion, he doesn’t feel. His actions are guided by the needs of his senses. The truth he believes in are all physical and can be sensed. Grief at the death of his mother, would have been a natural feeling, and one which would have been accepted by the society as truth. But Meursault doesn’t feel it and so he fails to express it. He is unaware of the consequences, he is unwilling to realize the effects his actions or non-actions would have on others, and this is his truth.
The books we read, I believe brings profound changes in the way we lead our lives. These are not visible changes, we can’t even feel them, cause we are incapacitated from this ability. I wonder……….
