After reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, I wanted to spend some time this month rereading some of my favorite novels. I managed to stay on track with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore . I took a little detour with Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End by Bart D. Ehrman. I'm now back on schedule with my rereading of Albert Camus' The Stranger.
I can't recall when I read The Stranger the first time - probably back in the 1980s. I began making note in my PC in 2011 of the books I read and I have it on record that I read the book in 2014 and 2020. Now, I've read the book once again. (December - 2024) Assuming that I'd managed to read it twice between 1980 and 2011, it's fair to say I've read The Stranger about five times - each time the Stuart Gilbert translation. There are other English translations, although I haven't been able to download copies.
Needless to say the book is one of my favorites.
In his 1956 analysis of the novel, Carl Viggiani wrote:
On the surface, L'Étranger gives the appearance of being an extremely simple though carefully planned and written book. In reality, it is a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings and formal qualities. It would take a book at least the length of the novel to make a complete analysis of meaning and form and the correspondences of meaning and form, in L'Étranger.
I'll be staying with Camus. I'm now reading The Plague which I last read in 2020 during the COVID 19 pandemic.
No comments:
Post a Comment