Number of pages: 117
Number of reading days: 1 - about two hours
Why I read this book: I decided to read this book after reading and watching the play South Downs by David Hare. Blakemore, the smart, precocious yet socially awkward protagonist of South Downs, reads L'Etranger and gets stuck reading the same page over and over again.
Selections from South Downs:
From Scene Eight:
Blakemore is sitting in the house study by himself, reading. Duffield comes in, out of school uniform, casually dressed.
Duffield We're wondering what you're doing.
Blakemore Duffield.
Duffield It's a beautiful autumn day. My mother and I were wondering what you were doing.
Blakemore I'm reading.
Duffield On a Saint's Day?
Blakemore Yes.
Duffield What are you reading on a Saint's Day?
Blakemore L'Etranger by Camus.
Duffield Is that a good book?
Blakemore It's about a man who ought to feel things, but doesn't.
Duffield And do you like it? Do you like the book?
Blakmore doesn't answer for a moment.
Blakemore?
Blakemore Duffield, please go away.
He has spoken in a small, sad voice. Duffield looks at him, thoughtful.
The whole school is empty, there's no one here, everyone's in Brighton. It's a holiday. Why pick on me?
From Scene Twelve:
Blakemore is sitting in Duffield's study with his book. Duffield takes it from him, and flicks through its pages. Silence.
Duffield It's still L'Etranger, is it? You're a clever fellow and you've been four weeks on the same bok. Will you ever finish L'Etranger?
Blakemore That depends.
Duffield On what?
Blakemore Actually I've been four weeks on the same page.
Duffield You don't think fourteen is early for a mid-life crisis?
Blakemore doesn't react.
You've barely spoken for a month. You just sit and ration out Fortnum's fruit cake as if it were a sacrament. Belinda meant you to eat it, not keep it as a relic. What's happening? Have you given up?
Later in Scene Twelve
Duffield If there's a mushroom cloud in fifty years, you think people are going to blame you? 'World War Three. This is all Blakemore's fault?' I don't think so.
Blakemore looks at him resentfully.
Blakemore Well, it doesn't matter, does it...
Duffield Doesn't it?
Blakemore What people think. That doesn't matter. What matters is my own conscience.
Duffield Ah, I see.
Blakemore I've got to live with myself.
Duffield Ah well, yes. We all have to live with ourselves.
Blakemore looks at him, suspicious of his tone.
Blakemore And what does that mean?
Duffield You know, Blakemore, it occurs to most of us quite early that we're going to have to slug through life in the company of someone we don't particularly like. Meaning, ourselves.
Blakemore But, Duffield, you must like yourself. Everyone else does.
Duffield Do they? Do they really?
Duffield smiles, knowing better.
And in the circumstances the only thing we can do is get on with it. Finish the book, finish the cake and move one.
Thoughts: This book appealed to all of my strange reading loves. The absurdist world that the protagonist, Mersault, inhabits brought to mind Kafka's The Trial, and yet, all of the events in The Stranger seem plausible. They just lack meaning. When he kills a man, he doesn't feel anything. there is no reason besides the sun shining in his eyes. It almost seemed like he didn't commit the murder--that it just happened to him.
Camus pairs the very unemotional, unfeeling Mersault with many side characters who are full of deep emotion and life. At Mersault's mother's funeral, a man named Thomas Perez expresses overwhelming sadness while Mersault, big surprise, feels nothing at his mother's death:
"Several other images from that day have stuck in my mind: for instance, Perez's face when he caught up with us for the last time, just outside the village. Big tears of frustration and exhaustion were streaming down his cheeks. But because of all the wrinkles, they weren't dripping off. They spread out and ran together again, leaving a watery film over his ruined face."
Another of these foils is Raymond. While Mersault is honest and never feels the need or desire to lie, Raymond often lies in order to conform with the rest of society.
Mersault only experiences life through the senses: when he's swimming with Marie, the funeral procession, the sun in his eyes when he kills the Arab man, the ocean. Because of this, there was a lot of water imagery. And I am only a little obsessed with water. There was a particular passage (not about water... about sensory experiences) that I felt really demonstrated the estrangement between Mersault and the society. He watches the goings-on of the outside world, describing them to us in great detail, but he does not participate. Separated by a window, he only watches them.
Favorite Passages & Quotes:
"A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so."
"There was the same dazzling red glare. The sea gasped for air with each shallow, stifled little wave that broke on the sand."
"At the same instant the sweat in my eyebrows dripped down over my eyelids all at once and covered them with a warm, thick film. My eyes were blinded behind the curtain of tears and salt. All I could feel were the cymbals of sunlight crashing on my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear flying up from the knife in front of me. The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes. That's when everything began to reel. The see carried up a thick, fiery breath. It seemed to me as if the sky had split open from one end to the other to rain down fire."
"I would suddenly have the urge to be on a beach and to walk down to the water. As I imagined the sound of the first waves under my feet, my body entering the water and the sense of relief it would give me, all of a sudden I would feel just how closed in I was by the walls of my cell."
"I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison."
"The cries of the newspaper vendors in the already languid air, the last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sandwich sellers, the screech of the streetcars turning sharply through the upper town, and that hum in the sky before night engulfs the port: all his mapped out for me a route I knew so well before going to prison and which now I traveled blind. Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content."
"I would listen to my heartbeat. I couldn't imagine that this sound which had been with me for so long could ever stop. I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head."
"Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn't much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living - and for thousands of years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying. At that point, what would disturb my train of though was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me."
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For other books I'm reading this summer, see: Summer Reading List 2012
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