The Stranger

Mother died today, or maybe yesterday. He isn't sure.

That may be the most famous opening line of the twentieth century. It belongs to Meursault, an ordinary office clerk in Algiers. He goes to the old people's home for his mother's vigil. He doesn't cry. He drinks coffee and smokes. The next day he goes swimming, runs into Marie, who used to work at his office, and that evening they see a comedy together.

The first half reads almost like a diary of nothing: work, sun, drinks with his neighbor Raymond. Then, on a white-hot afternoon on a beach, with the light stabbing his eyes, he shoots an Arab man. He pauses. Then he fires four more times.

The second half is the trial, and this is where it turns absurd. The prosecutor barely cares about the shots. What he keeps asking is: why didn't he cry at his mother's funeral? Why did he take up with a woman the very next day? Witness after witness takes the stand, and what they prove isn't that he killed a man. It's that he's inhuman.

Society rarely judges what you did. It judges what you failed to look like. Camus put it bluntly in a 1955 preface to the American edition: in our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral risks being sentenced to death.

Meursault isn't cold. He refuses to lie. As Camus explained it, Meursault won't say one word more than he actually feels. Asked if he loves Marie, he says probably not. Asked to repent, he says what he mostly feels is annoyance. That honesty makes everyone around him deeply uncomfortable.

The world is indifferent, and that's not bad news. In the last pages, Meursault finally opens himself to the gentle indifference of the world. My reaction surprised me. I didn't feel crushed. I felt relieved, as if someone had finally admitted for me that so many of our tears, our statements, our "right answers" are a performance for other people.

It's short enough to read in an afternoon, and it stays with you much longer. Read it if you've ever been judged for not fitting in or not reacting "the right way," or if you're tired of having to display the correct emotion about everything.

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.