The Stranger

What a ferocious finish. The tirade against a priest's feeble benedictions. The book suggested first Catcher by its general meh, and also Hemingway or Voltaire or Coetzee by its concise sentences. It's a style I'm drawn to, one descriptive and forthright. Maybe it's a copout, to avoid the pitfalls of more flowery writing, but you can't say it hasn't worked for these guys.

I loved the humid frustration, all over Algiers but first felt trudging behind Maman's coffin. The clinging clothes and desperation, the ravenous desire to escape. That's enough, we're told. Everything else was incidental, and maybe Meursault was indeed "unlucky". But Camus wasn't taking on the judicial system, and the book's treasure comes from the vehement backlash of this man.

Its tone leaves you haunted, and all of chapter 5's a catapult. His descending rationality at the extremity of his life, helpless and hope-hungry. "Despite my willingness to understand, I just couldn't accept such arrogant uncertanty." No one had the right to pray for him, and in that collective fatality he found his only restitution.

"For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators on the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."