The Stranger by Albert Camus

I’ve been writing recently about books inspired by the moon. In Albert Camus’s The Stranger, it’s the scorching sun that drives the senseless murder at the center of the plot.

This existential novella completes my trio of posts on the theme of regret, and it’s a big departure from the first two. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway recounts the death-bed regrets of a writer who abandoned his literary talent, while in “Feathers,” Raymond Carver explores a more nagging, harder-to-identify regret, as a man slowly comes to understand that life has disappointed him.

In contrast, the narrator of The Stranger, known only as Meursault, feels no regret at all – not even after killing another man.

This was my first time reading The Stranger, and while it's an important book to know, I can't say that I liked it. I also struggled a few years back to get into The Plague, so I think Camus simply may not be my cup of tea. (Camus fans, I invite you to try to convince me otherwise.)

I decided to read the book, in translation from the original French, after seeing the new French-language film version. The film has startlingly beautiful black-and-white cinematography, a great period feel and an appropriately intense actor in the lead role. I bought a copy of the book tied to the movie release and only later realized that I already had an older translation tucked away on my bookshelf. So, which one to read? I went for the older version, to perhaps encounter a different tone from the film.

A quick plot summary: The setting is French-colonial Algiers, likely in the early 1940s. Meursault, an office clerk, is strikingly indifferent to everything – even the death of his mother barely fazes him. He shrugs when his girlfriend presses him to marry her. When his boss offers to send him to Paris, he replies that he doesn’t care one way or another. Ultimately, Meursault gets entangled with a group of Arab men who are feuding with his neighbor. One afternoon on the beach under the sun's relentless glare, he shoots one of them, then inexplicably fires four more shots into the man's motionless body. Meursault is put on trial, convicted and sentenced to death. At the end of the book, he rejects a chaplain’s efforts to convert him and concludes dismissively that life has no meaning.

My two copies of Camus's The Stranger.

I view this book as a thought experiment on what happens when someone simply won't do or say what others expect. Through Meursault, Camus is commenting on what he sees as the absurdity of life and how society demands a performative display of emotions even when they are hypocritical or perverse. For example, the prosecution seems much less outraged that Meursault committed a cold-blooded murder than that he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral.

After his arrest, Meursault is given multiple opportunities to lessen his punishment; he could claim he acted in self-defense or throw himself at the court’s mercy. In a nod to the racial disparities of the French colonial system, Camus makes it clear that Meursault could tip the outcome if he would only try. But Meursault refuses. He won’t lie, exaggerate or pretend. He simply does nothing. When the magistrate asks if he regrets his actions, Meursault recounts the exchange this way: “After thinking a bit, I said that what I felt was less regret than a kind of vexation – I couldn’t find a better word for it.”

Meursault is not completely robotic about what is happening. In prison, he muses about things he misses about his old life, mostly the company of women and smoking cigarettes. Still, he concludes that “except for these privations, I wasn’t too unhappy,” a line that underscores the emotional vacuum at his core.

Overall, I found Meursault's character to be exasperating, even as an archetype. Although the book is short, it felt tedious and Camus's message is repetitive. There are only so many times I need to hear that nothing matters.

Only after finishing the book did I start to explore the differences between the translation I read, the Stuart Gilbert version from the 1940s, and the newer one, by Matthew Ward. I've been flipping through both of my copies to compare them, and the Ward translation feels smoother and more contemporary. Just take a look at the book's famous opening lines.

Here's Gilbert: "Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday."

And contrast that with Ward: "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."

There's a significant difference here. Gilbert uses the word "mother" in the first sentence whereas Ward retains Camus's "maman." Camus's choice is curious because maman is an affectionate word like mommy or mama. I can understand why Gilbert thought it was more fitting to Meursault's remoteness to use the more formal "mother," but it's a departure from what Camus intended.

Circling back to the concept of regret, I looked up the etymology of the word as part of my exploration of how people express this emotion. It's derived from the 14th-century French word regreter, which means "to look back with distress or sorrowful longing.” If to regret is to look back in sorrow, Camus makes it abundantly obvious that Meursault is incapable of this sentiment.

Perhaps this is why, after reading Hemingway and Carver, who speak to feelings of regret so beautifully and ruefully, The Stranger left me unfulfilled.