There may be poetic justice in that, though it doesn't seem to be the futilitarian point that Camus is making.

Mersault's unkindness toward his mother weighs more heavily in the court's scalesĪgainst him than the fact that in a drunk and heat-dazed moment he shot an Arab. Mersault, the killer who cares about practically nothing, Camus seems toīe saying, doesn't make a lot more sense than the prosecution that by bringing in all kinds of extraneous material succeeds in killing him. The stranger of the story is a young man who commits an unpremeditated crime in a moment of aberration and then is slowly and methodically condemned to death for it. The frying-wet heat of summer, however, is familiar. The scene of “The Stranger” is Algiers-not the Algiers full of Allied uniforms and beefs and armament and confusion and jeeps roaring up the rue Michelet that so many Americans have known-but a purely French and Arab Algiers of some timeīefore the war hit that steep town. Meantime, he has expounded his philosophy of angry fortitude in editorials, essays, novels and plays. He was one of the editors of a clandestine paper, Combat, which survived the LiberationĪs one of the most vigorous and untrammeled of the Paris dailies.

During the war he was active in the Resistance movement. In Paris, where he has suffered the fate of so many good writers by becoming a publisher. He was born in French North Africa in 1913 and now lives Brown's article in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review, is an outstanding leader of the writers who have emerged in France since the war. That's one hopeful sign of French recovery, though the point of view, like the reality, may be ruggedlyĬamus, as we learned from John L. To be boiling again with all sorts of new-and some not so new-literary movements, reading from right to left and back again.

(Give it time, give it time.) In Britain, as in other parts of the Continent, nothing much has happened to disturb the seismographs of literature. Not yet formed its ranks to express itself and harass its touchy elders. In America, the months since the end of the war have been marked by a gaudy parade of historical novels born in the splendid isolation of the research files and bound happily for the coasts of technicolor. He Stranger,” a novel of crime and punishment by Albert Camus, published today, should touch off in this country a renewed burst of discussionĪbout the young French writers who are at the moment making more unusual literary news than the writers of any other country.

The stranger outsider