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L'étranger Albert Camus publisher: Gallimard, Paris, 1942 translated as: The Outsider publisher: Querido, Amsterdam, 1942 translation: Stuart Gilbert refered to by: [Terug naar Oegstgeest] Jan Wolkers The Castle Franz Kafka Dangling Man Saul Bellow [De avonden] Gerard Reve Herzog Saul Bellow [Terug naar Oegstgeest] Jan Wolkers City of Glass Paul Auster This Blinding Absence of Light Tahar Ben Jelloun Children of the Alley Naguib Mahfouz
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Meursault leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life in Algiers until he commits a random act of violence. His lack of emotion and failure to show remorse only serve to increase his guilt in the eyes of the law, and challenges the fundamental values of society a set of rules so binding that any person breaking them is condemned as an outsider. For Meursault, | this is an insult to his reason and a betrayal of his hopes; for Camus it encapsulates the absurdity of life. In The Outsider (1942), Camus explores the predicament of the individual who refuses to pretend and is prepared to face the indifference of the universe, courageously and alone. |
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| ON ALBERT CAMUS' BOOKSHELF A Hero of Our Time Mikhail Lermontov, 1840 Lermontov's only novel examines a weary and cynical man trapped in the futility of his age. Crime and Punishment Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, 1866 Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, commits a random murder without remorse or regret. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. The Piazza Tales Herman Melville, 1856 Six of the author's best short stories, including two adventures, a classic mystery tale of mutiny and rescue, a satire and a series of allegorical sketches. Camus described them as: 'Kafka, but then flesh-and-blood.' The Immoralist André Gide, 1904 Gide's novel examines the inevitable conflicts that arise when a pleasure seeker challenges conventional society and, without moralizing, raises complex issues involving the extent of personal responsibility. The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett, 1930 It's 1928. San Francisco PIs Sam Spade and Miles Archer are engaged by a young lady to shadow a man she alleges has kidnapped her sister. Not true - and Archer is soon the late Archer, leaving Sam to seek both his killer and the titular statue. (See also: The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, 1939) The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler, 1939 Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being blackmailed and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out for him even before he stumbles over the first corpse... (See also The Maltese Falcon) Nausea Jean-Paul Sartre, 1938 Antoine Roquentin, an introspective historian, records the disturbing shifts in his perceptions and his struggle to restore meaning to life in a continuing present and without lies. (See also The Wall, 1939) The Wall Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939 A collection of stories where the neurosis of the modern world is mirrored in the lives of the people that inhabit it. (See also Nausea, 1938) | BOOKS BY ALBERT CAMUS: The Outsider 1942 ('cycle des absurdes') An ordinary man is unwittingly caught up in a senseless murder in Algeria. | WHAT TO READ AFTER THE STRANGER? LIFE IS ABSURD The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories Franz Kafka, 1915-1924 People (and animals) in a hostile world. The Time of Indifference Alberto Moravia, 1929 The reactions of members of a bourgeois family to impending financial crisis. [De muur] Jos Vandeloo, 1958 Two novellas and seven prose pieces by Flemish author Vandeloo. The Music of Chance Paul Auster, 1990 Nashe comes into an inheritance and decides to pursue a life of freedom. He meets Pozzi, a gambler, who exerts a terrible fascination over him, and together they take a desperate gamble. Under the Net Iris Murdoch, 1954 Iris Murdoch's first novel is set in a part of London where struggling writers rub shoulders with successful bookies, and film starlets with frantic philosophers. Fatelessness Imre Kertész, 1975 The daily life of prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy who is deported to the camp with his father. MAN/ WOMAN AGAINST THE WORLD The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera, 1984 Interweaves story and dream, past and present, and philosophy and poetry in the sardonic and erotic tale of two couples - Tomas and Teresa, and Sabina and her Swiss lover, Gerhart. Dangling Man Saul Bellow, 1944 Freedom can be a noose around a man's neck. Our Lady of the Flowers Jean Genet, 1943 Written in a French prison, this semi-autobiographical novel describes the life of a young murderer. The House of Refuge Willem Frederik Hermans, 1951 Dutch partisan misbehaves in unoccupied villa. NO-FRILLS PROSE Disgrace J.M. Coetzee, 1999 After an impulsive affair with his student sours, David Lurie retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. But he and Lucy become victims of a disturbing attack which brings into relief all their faultlines. In Our Time Ernest Hemingway, 1925 Fifteen vignettes concerning the conflicts, situations, problems, and personalities characteristic of contemporary society. The Unnamable Samuel Beckett, 1953 Part III of Beckett's Trilogy. A man without an identity tries to find out who he is. |
| The Myth of Sisyphus 1942 ('cycle des absurdes') Inspired by the myth of a man condemned to ceaselessly push a rock up a mountain and watch it roll back to the valley below, Camus' essay The Myth of Sisyphus is an impassioned argument for the value of life in a world without religious meaning. | ||
| Caligula 1944 ('cycle des absurdes') The play Caligula reveals some aspects of the existential notion of 'the absurd' by portraying an emperor so mighty and so desperate in his search for freedom that he inevitably destroys gods, men and himself. | ||
| The Plague 1947 ('cycle des révoltés) The people of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague. Cut off from the rest of the world, they each respond in their own way to the challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that we witness the course of the epidemic. | ||
| The Just 1950 ('cycle des révoltés) Play about a Russian revolutionary with a crisis of conscience. To convey his concept of moral revolutionaries, Camus fictionalized the 1905 Moscow assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovitch, the uncle of Czar Nicholas II. | ||
| The Rebel 1951 ('cycle des révoltés) Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'. | ||
| The Fall 1956 Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a successful Parisian barrister, has come to recognize the deep-seated hypocrisy of his existence. His epigrammatic and, above all, discomforting monologue gradually saps, then undermines, the reader' s own complacency. | ||
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| The Ledge editor-in-chief: Stacey Knecht, info@the-ledge.com Thanks to: De digitale pioniers and Het Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Design: Maurits de Bruijn |
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