The Stranger by Albert Camus (translated by Matthew Ward) // 123 pgs
Published in 1942 by French author Albert Camus, The Stranger has long been considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."
This is a book I grabbed only aware of its general “classicness”, but not of the plot. It's super short, but it packs a good punch in its length. I feel like it's made to be reread to fully take everything in, and I enjoyed how the little, seemingly irrelevant events in Part One (such as the protagonist hanging out with his girlfriend) pop up again in Part Two. I really felt for the protagonist and the themes of existentialism it presented, and the ending being one of general acceptance is nice. Risking an incorrect interpretation, I do also feel like it serves as an interesting allegory for mental illness/neurodivergence in a society that does not care to understand; how we find the "strangers" to us and, ignoring their perspective, criminalize them based on our own morality.
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