by Albert Camus
French Algeria, 1942
"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas" ["Mom died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know"] confides the eerily detached narrator at the outset of L'etranger [The Stranger]. "J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile : << Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. >> Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier" ["I received a telegram from the old people's home: 'Mother deceased. Burial tomorrow. Regards.' That means nothing. Maybe it was yesterday"] (9). Meursault, the pied noir narrator of Camus' first novel and an enigmatic character who variously comes across as either "slow," mentally ill, evil or some toxic mix of all of the above even if you don't buy his oddly persuasive story that he's extremely debilitated by the blinding power of the Algerian sun, coolly goes on to cop to the crime of having gunned down a man described only as "l'Arabe" ["the Arab"] (92). In the trial that follows, a guilty verdict is arrived at which seems to stem more from the accused's apparent lack of sorrow over his mother's death and from his lack of remorse over the unnamed homicide victim's death than from the possibly premeditated hate crime slaying of "l'Arabe" itself. Having not read L'étranger in something like 25 or 30 years but having wanted to reacquaint myself with the novel in anticipation of finally getting around to reading Kamel Daoud's 2013 literary sensation Meursault, contre-enquête [The Meursault Investigation], I was happy to be reminded about how powerful and, well, unsettling Camus' classic is--not least for the primal nature of the spare first person narration; the ethical sleight of hand with which the novelist manages to build some sympathy for the narrator even though Meursault's guilt as a cold-blooded killer is never in doubt; and for the occasional moments like this one in which four bullets gratuitously shot into a dead man's already inert corpse are almost lyrically transformed into a description equating them with being something like "quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur la porte du malheur" ["four brief knocks on the door of misfortune"] (93). In short, the best novel penned by a French Algerian Joe Strummer lookalike that I'm likely to sing the praises of all month.
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Entradas
