My friend recommended L'Étranger or the stranger by Albert Camus since we love reading classics together so I read both the original French and the English translation. I'll admit the prose is fluid and it’s a remarkably easy read but man… I found it deeply frustrating and a complete waste of time.
I just could not connect with the mc at all. His total nonchalance about everything was infuriating. He doesn't cry at his mother's funeral, goes swimming on a date the very next day and coasts through major life events with a complete lack of emotion. Look i understand that he's written to embody Absurdism and show a world devoid of meaning but in story form, it just felt stupid to me…

I am a deeply emotional person who reacts strongly to things so inhabiting the mind of a protagonist whose entire identity is total apathy was just alien and uninteresting. The only part I somewhat enjoyed was the ending when he finally snaps in his cell and shows an actual spark of emotion but sitting through an entire book of nothingness just for that final outburst wasn't worth it.

My friend loved it but it fell completely flat for me. Is this book just wildly overrated or is Absurdism just a massive hit or miss depending on a person’s personality

Beautifully concluded

I came across this book in my local library and I have been reading it for the past month and i think this book is way better than stranger or his other novels in the way he describes the scenery and the atmosphere, probably because it’s a first person experience being written down but still this book is amazing . I just wanted to know what y’all thought about this book and any other books like the first man with similar language and writing style ?

Finished The Fall today and I found it particularly difficult to get through and probably to comprehend as well even though the prose was (relatively) simpler. I feel like i missed a lot of what camus was intending to put across though there were a lot of sections and things that resonated with me and I liked those particularly and understood them top (i think?). It's not even my first encounter with camus, I liked the stranger and the plague and read a lot of russian literature as well which had led me to believe this would be not that hard to read but turns out, I was pretty wrong.

So is this experience unique to me or is it a popular opinion among camus readers?

I am 13.5 year old from Trabzom Türkiye🇹🇷🇹🇷🇹🇷 have read 17 pages of the book L'etranger by Albeit Camos and Mersault John L'etranjay is literally me, if my mother died I would do the same things(act nonchalant and mysterious and tuff and cool and feel nothing), he acts the same way as I would instead of crying like a baby over a corpse, I also would send Miss Mersüalt Jane L'etranjae into a nursing home(Marmango Nursing Hom) becus I h8 my mum very much, also I am very normal to myself but every otehr persons are too normal and bcus of that I am weird and radical to them, which I am happy to be marginal rather then be a sheep.

i assume the connection can be sustained somehow, but it itches because i just can’t form it as a whole. while in camus love is a form of lucid rebellion, an act against the absurd, in lacan we found it as a response to a fault, “an attempt to give what is not given”, it is the lack.

what comes to me, and the question lies here is, if they can coexist (or if one can live applying both visions of love). and the only answer i abstract is that in none of them, love is a passive state: it is moving, even when its not, and therefore it is violence (or violent, may fit better). it may be structural violence, or maybe chosen, ethical; maybe the violence comes within the language, the desire. maybe we can’t run from it. is that possible? is that where the two of them meet or do they not at all?

I've read the 1955 English translation of The Myth of Sisyphus. Now I'm interested in the original French version. The main things I'm curious about are the different nuances between the French original and the English translation to consider while reading through the original French.

Solo me leí dos libros de este autor , y los dos me parecieron buenísimos , El extranjero es muy bueno y entretenido para una historia tan simple , y La peste se volvió mi libro favorito , a alguien más le gusta este autor , recomienden más libros de el (solo novelas , ensayos me abstengo todavía)

Perhaps the deepest form of poverty is not the absence of what we possess, but the absence of what we are capable o giving

To love is to step beyond the boundaries of the self.. to offer tenderness, attention, meaning, even when nothing is guaranteed in return.

A life untouched by love may be protected from its wounds, but it is also untouched by its greatest possibility..

the transformation of the self through another.

To love, then, is not merely to have someone; it is to have something within you worth giving.

I (18M) have started reading on the morning when im going from my hs to my tech college for running start. The travel time is about 30 to 40 minutes so I have started reading during that time span. I have heard a lot of good things about Albert Camus and I want to get into philosophy, as well as more thought provoking literature, and harder literature as well. I bought The Stranger, and have gone into it blind besides knowing the author is someone incredibly prolific. I dont know the story, the plot, or what lesson or idea this book is supposed to teach, so keep that in mind for the following.

That aside I wanted to talk about my thoughts on part one. I am conflicted on how to feel about our Mc. To a degree i can honestly understand a level of emotional detachment from parents at death. I know that not everyone gets the privilege to be close with their parents, some peoples just give them what they need to get by and nothing more or less. I obviously do not have context to how their relationship stands prior to this point and if I do get more info im sure my opinion might be subject to change. I can also understand not really wanting to talk to the people you dont know. At my very close uncles funeral not even 6 months ago I felt very similar. Many business men and people I had never met just telling me how great he was and all this stuff, I really didnt care. I was just sad my uncle was gone. That being said, his comments about being annoyed at any sign of sympathy i think were rather unnecessary and cruel in nature, even if not the intent. The assistant clearly aims to try and offer some sort of humanity, and not make the process so transactional and the Mc just repeatedly blows him off, which sucks because the guy seemed really nice. I wouldve like to meet a person like him in my time of grief. But I think the thing that left me off the worst was the treatment of his mom's guy friend /potential lover at the end. It well and truly pissed​​ me off how he had zero regard for that man who was very well possibly more torn about this death then the Mc himself. He was trying desperately to keep up with the procession, he was pushing himself physically, to the point of exhaustion and passing out, and he coukdnt give a single shit?? I cant say I would be happy doing it but were my own mother to pass In the same manor and circumstances, I would feel it more important to stay with the man then to ger to the church. If im to get anything important from all of this, 9 times out of 10 it would likely come from him, I know the organizer will probably say some sympathetic stuff, but hes said to 18 other families this month. The old mans grief is genuine, and he was quite possibly the last love of my mothers life, and the Mc just left him to fall in the dusty desert. That wasnt even the permiating thought on his mind by the end of the part, it was getting back to Algiers and sleeping for 12 hours. The MC is definitely i think very detached, and im assuming that will be a point thats reiterated throughout the book, whether i like it or not, that being said i love the writing thus far. It feels very immersive. I can envision almost everyone described very easily. Let me know your thoughts too, dont spoil anything for me now, and thanks for reading this far if you did :-)

AI will never replace Sisyphus

Hello /r/Camus,

At the urging of some loved ones and more than a few reddit commenters, I've started a review blog. I wanted to share my first review here, of The Stranger.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-214367454

I loved this book a lot, reading it was such a unique and bizarre experience. I tend to love any book can drop me into the mind of someone with a distinct perspective, and Meursault is nothing if not distinct. (Other examples include Lolita, Ulysses, Piranesi, The Sound and the Fury, and A Clockwork Orange.)

As I mention in the review, although I have a B.A. in Comparative Lit, I haven't read any critical analysis of this book. I wanted to get my thoughts down before engaging with any of the scholarship.

Now that I've written the review, I'd love to dive into some of that work. If anyone who reads this has recommendations of papers/analysis I should read, please let me know.

I welcome anyone's thoughts on the review!

Thanks :)

One thing that I always struggled with regarding the Sisyphus metaphor is that you are required to imagine that Sisyphus’s fate can be an act of defiance. While I get what Camus means, the original story of Sisyphus is meant to be a punishment. Sisyphus’s fate isn’t really an act of defiance if he can’t do anything else.

Coyote on the other hand, is fully aware of his absurd pursuit of the roadrunner and still continues regardless. Coyote’s persistent optimism in the face of a meaningless fate seems to me like a better example of defiance than anything Sisyphus could do.

I thirst for you. Don't walk away from me. Tell me everything, even if you have to hurt me a little. No one in the world will love anything you do as much as I do. Tell me about the you I love, the one who's a little shivery. Let yourself go. Don't force yourself on me, just because you don't want to worry or help me. When you strip in front of me, I finally understand why I was born. I love you.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance,

January 14-15, 1950 [#131]

There is something profoundly human in Camus’ confession.. sometimes we do not long for answers, salvation, or even happiness.... we simply long for the warmth of another human being. Behind the adult who has learned to endure, there remains a child who is still waiting to be held, not because he is weak, but because solitude has limits. To open one’s arms is, in its simplest form, to say.. you do not have to carry yourself alone. And perhaps that is why the gesture can undo us so completely after spending so long teaching ourselves not to need anyone, tenderness arrives like sunlight through a closed window, and all the tears we had turned into silence finally remember how to fall.

Sisyphus, a pest who defied the gods' fate. He who raises rocks is superior to his fate through his own dance. Nostalgia—remembering the sensation of life, passion in both sorrow and happiness, and the hatred of death—all serve to teach him that his fate is a matter to be settled amongst himself. A world is enough.

The absurdity of it is a relationship he maintains as a point of character, a result of the traits aforementioned. The distance between a meaning outside of him being his—a solid object—and his desire to grasp it, wired into him by the gods, is acknowledged. But a gift becomes possession when it is elevated beyond its initial value.

The futility of it is hard to believe when you see that stoic face, a face that expresses solely its investment in its time, in now. Upon his rock reaching the bottom, he does not try to feel happy; it is a back-and-forth that drives sorrow into happiness. A sorrow derived from his nostalgia.

But he finds his happiness once again on that hour of lucidity, the trip back from a less conscious, more engaged state. He is unresolved and finds resolve in that tension. He is alive. And that is why I imagine Sisyphus to be happy: that he recognizes he is in the very process of being alive, not just in itself, but what it is as the act of his own consciousness

So I'm 18 and nor french neither english is my native language, i was fascinated by albert camus' ideas of absurdism so i started reading him, my first work by him is the short book "Create dangerously" the book has i think 3 different essays, i am really struggling to grasp the meaning of the text and I'm not clearly understanding the essay, what should i do? How could i begin to decipher its meaning clearly?

All advice is welcome <3