madcjones 's review for:

The Stranger by Albert Camus

3.75

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At first reading this I kept thinking 'why is this such a popular class?', then when I got about 75% in I was like 'ohhh ok I get it'. However. I think too many people (especially those who value this book for its existentialism) too quickly overlook the colonial geopolitical context of the book. If you remove the absurdism, this is a book about a white French man in colonial Algeria who kills a native Algerian man (known only as 'the Arab'), and during his trial all anyone cares about is whether he loved his mom enough. Reading this in a post-colonial context, I was obviously bothered by the mistreatment of Raymond's mistress and 'the Arab' as people of color under France's brutal colonial rule (which is simply not addressed or alluded to), beyond general mistreatment of a beaten woman and a murdered man. Part of the point of this book is that Mersault is presented with disturbing/upsetting scenarios (his mother dying, his neighbor beating his dog, his friend Raymond beating his mistress, etc) and doesn't express any distress or sympathy as one would expect. The main thing I've been wondering is why Camus decided to make the two main victims of this book oppressed people of color in a colonial regime? How would the reader of the time (likely in support of French colonial rule) have reacted to the race of Raymond's mistress and the murder victim? I'd have thought that white victims would have garnered more expected sympathy from a white audience, so wouldn't serve to highlight even further Mersault's inhuman lack of emotion. Many people just ignore the geopolitical context when reading this, but no matter what Camus' initial intent was, it is marred and weakened by the colonial lens over it.
In general it was well-written and impactful, I think the last chapter is what, for me, bumped up the rating from a 3.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Racism, Colonisation