What the book is
Camus’s 1942 novel, narrated by Meursault, a clerk in Algiers who kills a man on a beach and is tried as much for his character as his act.
Is it worth your time
Yes. Three hours, and it stays with you.
Episode in production · the written brief is below
EN
A man is condemned less for a killing than for failing to cry at his mother's funeral.
Camus's first novel in a hundred and twenty pages of flat, exact prose. The brief covers the plot in one minute, the absurd in three, and why the trial is the real subject of the book.
Chapters & takeaways4
- 0:00The plot, briefly
A funeral, a beach, a killing, a trial. Meursault reports all four the same way.
- 1:30The absurd
The universe does not answer. Camus's question is what you do once you accept that.
- 5:00The trial
He is convicted for his indifference, not his crime. Society needs him to perform grief.
- 8:20The Arab
The victim has no name. Modern readings, and Daoud's reply, start there.
Worth your time?
Yes. Read the whole thing.
What works
- Every sentence is doing work; it can be read in an evening
- The last chapter is one of the great endings in the century
What does not
- The colonial setting is unexamined, and that now reads as a gap
Read it if
- Anyone who wants to read a philosophy rather than be told one
Skip it if
- Readers who need a narrator they can like