Camus and you

Reading Camus is like watching a writer's mouth move as he's writing; there's a lit cigarette stuck to the corner of his mouth and he mumbles, but the words are perfectly clear and soon you, reader of Camus, are face-planted into existentialism where everybody but Camus and you are strangers. 

The Stranger is such an odd book, so restrained in its strangeness. Every page bristles with the silence of what Camus isn't saying, until the silence reaches the breaking point and everything he hasn't said is understood perfectly. And The Stranger is so utterly well named. I can't think of a book written in the 20th century that's better named, or of a title closer the spirit of its book. Perhaps Stranger in a Strange Land. Or Nausea. Or The Book of Disquiet. Can you think of a better title? If you can, please send me the name of it. 

P. 104, (after Meursault's trial): Despite my willingness to understand, I just couldn't accept such arrogant certainty. Because, after all, there really was something ridiculously out of proportion between the verdict such certainity was based on and the imperturbable march of events from the moment the verdict was announced. The fact that the sentence had been read at eight o'clock at night and not at five o'clock, the fact that it could have been an entirely different one, the fact that it had been decided by men who change their underwear...

Matthew Ward's translation of The Stranger from the French (Everyman's Library, 1993) is the translation to read. It's extremely readable in English and put me, at least, in the existential position of seeing how much a writer like J.D. Salinger stole from Camus.