The Outsider by Albert Camus My rating: 5 of 5 stars 'My Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know.' Short, dispassionate first-person sentences take us straight into the detached mind of the protagonist, Mersault. He’s not quite all there, something like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, but without the warmth. A blank page of a man. His subsequent trial, ostensibly about a murder, is really about his emotional flatness and his failure to grieve his mother. Morality, it seems, is more about appearances than acts. As with much of the Algiers of Camus' novels, the heat is relentless. Not just the sun, but the pressure. He seems dazed by it, like a man in a desert. And yet, no one else really sweats it. Unlike The Plague or The Myth of Sisyphus, where the whole town bakes, this is solitary heat. Internal, almost metaphysical. In modern psychiatric terms, you’d wonder about affective disorders or dissociation: impairment of social re...