The Stranger in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Mar 01, 2017 Jane rated it liked it

It's a bleak book, a disaffected man who seems to make no connections except for sex. Goes to his mother's funeral out of obligation but doesn't know the exact date of her death or her exact age. Kills a man because...well, he may be guilty of something and...he's Arab...and why not. Absurdist indeed. Nothing matters. We make our own meaning of our lives...and well, that's a step our narrator didn't seem inclined to bother with.

But pairing this book with The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Dao ...more

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May 28, 2008 jess rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, 2008

I read this book first in seventh grade. My best friend handed it to me, and made me swear to read it that afternoon. She said it was her favorite book, and she needed for me to read it, too. When someone gives me a book & says it is their favorite book, it is too much pressure to read it right away. The Stranger sat on my bookshelf for months, neglected, and then one afternoon I tucked myself into a corner to read it. I finished it before bed. I cradled it in my arms & wept afterwards.

I haven' ...more

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Oct 06, 2020 Ketutar Jensen rated it really liked it

I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: "In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death." I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.

Also, because he's an atheist. And sounds like an Aspie. He basically got sentenced to death because he refused to lie, pretend to be the way they expected him to be, and exaggerate his emotions.
Frankly, he sounds s

I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: "In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death." I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.

Also, because he's an atheist. And sounds like an Aspie. He basically got sentenced to death because he refused to lie, pretend to be the way they expected him to be, and exaggerate his emotions.
Frankly, he sounds so much like an Aspie, that I, an Aspie, would accept this book as "book with a MC with Autism"
(And I went to see if Albert Camus had Asperger's, and found out that it's generally accepted that this book is the first with description of a man with Asperger's... :-D)

"The book rests entirely on the thoughts, words and actions of its central character, Meursault, and these were found to show impairment of social relationships, communication and interaction, with other traits diagnostic of the Asperger’s subgroup of the autism spectrum disorder. It was then found that Camus had based Meursault on his close friend Galindo, and a search was therefore made for evidence of Galindo’s character; this revealed him to be an intelligent but odd person, who exhibited the characteristic impairment of social and personal behavior of Asperger’s syndrome. Thus, Camus had recognized and understood his friend’s strange behavior before Asperger’s syndrome had been defined; his use of it for the creation of Meursault is therefore the first published account of a man with this disorder."
:-D

That article continues: "Many of the interpretations and ideas developed from Meursault’s words, thoughts and actions must now be reconsidered, as they are a misreading of the words and behavior of a man with Asperger’s syndrome"
Huh? How have their been considered before? Because I read this as Autistic person, and I fully understand how he thinks and reacts. Pretty amazing, if Camus himself wasn't Autistic. ...more

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