#letranger

[madamoezelle]

Long awaited nothingburger.

[yorgunherakles]

bu duvarlara aylardır baktığımı söyledim.. dünyada bunlardan daha iyi tanıdığım ne bir şey ne de kimse vardı.

albert camus - yabancı

[buzzbookstore]

“The Stranger” by Albert Camus, 1st US Edition 2nd Printing [hardcover, 1946] #rarebooks #firstedition #letranger #bookcollecting #modernfirsts #treatyourshelf #booknerd #shelfporn https://www.instagram.com/p/B5gg4kkhSx5/?igshid=d72bg3meyood

[jaileblues-blog]

Je crois que j’ai dormi parce que je me suis réveillé avec des étoiles sur le visage

- Albert Camus, L’Étranger

[lozzealous]

snow day ❄️❄️

[blossomingbooks]

Book Review: The Stranger, Albert Camus

This week’s blossoming book review is L'étranger (English: The Stranger or The Outsider) by Albert Camus.

“(...) je m'ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde”

I picked up this book from my shelf and opened its cover while trying to deal with the concept of death, and the first words of the book were nothing less than “Aujourd'hui, maman est morte” (informing that on that day his mother had died). Going through its pages, I was searching for answers, hoping that in the words of an existentialist I’d find some comfort for my existential anxiety… But I must say, I finished the book with more questions than actual answers. 

Camus says he summarizes the book with this one phrase: “In our society, every man who doesn’t cry at the funeral of his mother risks being sentenced to death”. And, indeed, this is what happens to the main character, Meursault, a very impassive man with no ambition with a somewhat stoic vibe. He always gives evasive answers, like this one sentence which he uses quite a lot and may be translated to “it’s all the same to me". But Camus explains that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t “play the game” of society; he refuses to lie in order to “simplify life” like everybody else does. He refuses to mask his feelings, no matter how immoral they might be; in this way, he’s a stranger to the society he lives in, he’s “the outsider” (as the British translation puts it). There is a very voyeuristic aspect of him which reinforces that, and can be seem majorly on chapter 2 of part 1 — possibly my favorite chapter, because it has a very French cinematographic feel to it, with all the casual details and his attentive observation of other people.

L'étranger is part of a trilogy called the “cycle of the absurd” — together with a play and a very enlightening essay called “The Myth Of Sisyphus” —, which describes the fundaments of Camus’ philosophy. I find his concept of absurdism very interesting and possibly one of the branches of existentialism with which I identify the most. He understands the lack of meaning in life and how absurd is the search for it, gathering how limited our knowledge is. Therefore, we should accept the human inability to find any inherent value in life, but not in a nihilistic way: instead of giving up, Camus incites us to “embrace the absurd condition of human existence” and revolt against it by continuing to search for meaning. 

“The struggle itself […] is enough to fill a man’s heart”, he says at the end of the aforementioned essay, in which he compares the myth of Sisyphus (condemned to repeat the same meaningless task for eternity) with the absurdity of life. At the end of the day, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”…

[madamoezelle]

Will you be her Valentine?

[madamoezelle]

The Lady, The Man, The Pervert