anyone want to discuss?

masterpeice or wanna-be american noir overrated drivel?

neither.

i dont really understand why people say it changed the way writers write, etc.. all that really high praise for it. i thought it was a good book, an interesting pattern of events and reflections. but nothing mindblowing.

yeah, true.

it took me maybe two hours to read it, but even after that short, the indifference rubs off on you, at least for me. i think most people cant quite wrap their brains around that kind of unfeeling, or rather selective feelings of one human. its a bit fascinating in that sense. theres no malice, no remorse either, but you also cannot say that there was any sense of rebellion as motivation either.
it just is, its so damn objective in a way.

it seems like camus was trying to get more inside the head of the character from 'the postman always rings twice' but i felt there was more to understand that characters actions by. the atmosphere of his world was just more sleazy and sinister, as were some of the other characters. the stranger was almost straight existential dilemma.

blahh, whatever im so bad a ttalking about books.

I read the english translation and it was so...bland. I've tried at least a couple times to read it but I've never gotten through the first few pages.

yeah, the translation i had was pretty well done. theres a peice describing the translation process at the beginning and what was done to stay truer to the french prose.

i think camus was definitely going for that hard, short, almost spit out prose used by the early american 'roman noirs'. the language can be very simply and cold. if you havent read any james cain, it might give you some insight into what he was going for. he openly admits that he modeled The Stranger on The Postman Always rinsg Twice... the prose are definitely similar even though the tone of the book is a bit different.

I was just going to claim never to have read it, but then it occurred to me that The Stranger was also translated as The Outsider... which I have read.

I really enjoyed it, although I don't remember much about it now. I think that what no_ones_song said is right - the writing, at least in English, is very bland, but it has to be to capture and convey the disconnectedness of the character - the fact that these things go on in his life, which are life-changing, but which he barely feels.

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