Review: The Outsider

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 relationships, communication and interaction, indicate traits similar to the Asperger’s subgroup of the autism spectrum disorder. Yet Camus isn’t diagnosing. He’s observing. Meursault’s numbness feels less clinical than existential, a refusal to explore meaning where he feels there is none, and a refusal to seek hope in the love of others, or to seek salvation.

Written in 1942, mid-war, yet there’s no war in the book. No resistance, no occupied Paris. Just one man, oddly still, in a pre-war world that expects him to exhibit feeling. Maybe that’s Camus’ quiet rebellion—against moral theatre, against narrative arcs. Just the build up of interminable heat as we - the spectators - await his final day. And then silence.

I enjoyed the book, and gave it five stars.



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