Enigma Machine | The Weekly Standard: Sartre was more talked about than read: His philosophical masterwork Being and Nothingness was just too long. But Camus was perfect for reading, his short novel The Stranger and his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" each coming in at less than 200 pages. He was, at any rate, a better incitement to deep thought than Aristotle's De Anima or the Prior Analytics. But as a budding philosophy major, I was directed in college to Aristotle rather than Existentialism and managed not to read Camus's novel for many years, perhaps in part because I was wary of the hype generated by its extraordinary success.
Now, to tell the story of that success, we have a first-rate account by Alice Kaplan, a professor of French, rich with the intriguing details of how it all happened. Professor Kaplan is best known for an engaging memoir, French Lessons, and her writing is notable for its unpretentious clarity and vigorous life. Her claim is that no one yet "has told the story of exactly how Camus created this singular book," and to tell that story, she has brought to bear extensive research, travel, and a careful presentation of both Algeria and France during World War II (The Stranger was published in 1942). She distinguishes her voice from the "omniscient" one of standard literary criticism; rather, she aspires to employ a "close third-person narrative," as if she were looking over Camus's shoulder and telling the story from his point of view.
The Stranger was preceded by an unpublished novel Camus wrote in the late 1930s, A Happy Death. Its protagonist, Patrice Mersault, murders a rich man, makes it look like suicide, takes his money and travels about Europe, marries, longs for a meditative, solitary life—and in an "unprepared and hurried ending" (Kaplan's words) dies of tuberculosis, a happy man. The fledgling novel was full of Mersault's thoughts about life, sex, beauty, and was provoked in part by Camus's own travels in Europe, along with other events. The result was an over-freighted creation that tried to say too much too fully. Camus sent the novel to his old teacher, Jean Grenier, who criticized it. Full of uncertainty, but still full of purpose, Camus began to write the novel that would eventually become The Stranger.
Declarations from Camus's notebooks from the time testify to the new principles he was developing for his fiction, such as "The true work of art is the one that says the least," or "To write one must fall slightly short of the expression (rather than beyond it). No chit chat." Rather than attempting, as he had done in A Happy Death, to make his hero appealing, he leaves him on his own, as it were, depriving him even of a first name while adding a "u" to his surname, Meursault.
Now, to tell the story of that success, we have a first-rate account by Alice Kaplan, a professor of French, rich with the intriguing details of how it all happened. Professor Kaplan is best known for an engaging memoir, French Lessons, and her writing is notable for its unpretentious clarity and vigorous life. Her claim is that no one yet "has told the story of exactly how Camus created this singular book," and to tell that story, she has brought to bear extensive research, travel, and a careful presentation of both Algeria and France during World War II (The Stranger was published in 1942). She distinguishes her voice from the "omniscient" one of standard literary criticism; rather, she aspires to employ a "close third-person narrative," as if she were looking over Camus's shoulder and telling the story from his point of view.
The Stranger was preceded by an unpublished novel Camus wrote in the late 1930s, A Happy Death. Its protagonist, Patrice Mersault, murders a rich man, makes it look like suicide, takes his money and travels about Europe, marries, longs for a meditative, solitary life—and in an "unprepared and hurried ending" (Kaplan's words) dies of tuberculosis, a happy man. The fledgling novel was full of Mersault's thoughts about life, sex, beauty, and was provoked in part by Camus's own travels in Europe, along with other events. The result was an over-freighted creation that tried to say too much too fully. Camus sent the novel to his old teacher, Jean Grenier, who criticized it. Full of uncertainty, but still full of purpose, Camus began to write the novel that would eventually become The Stranger.
Declarations from Camus's notebooks from the time testify to the new principles he was developing for his fiction, such as "The true work of art is the one that says the least," or "To write one must fall slightly short of the expression (rather than beyond it). No chit chat." Rather than attempting, as he had done in A Happy Death, to make his hero appealing, he leaves him on his own, as it were, depriving him even of a first name while adding a "u" to his surname, Meursault.