Description
'My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.' In The Outsider (1942), his classic existentialist novel, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach near Algiers, his lack of remorse compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and the law. Yet he is as much a victim as a criminal. Albert Camus' portrayal of a man confronting the absurd, and revolting against the injustice of society, depicts the paradox of man's joy in life when faced with the 'tender indifference' of the world. Sandra Smith's translation, based on close listening to a recording of Camus reading his work aloud on French radio in 1954, sensitively renders the subtleties and dream-like atmosphere of L'Étranger. Albert Camus (1913-1960), French novelist, essayist and playwright, is one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. His most famous works include The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947), The Just (1949), The Rebel (1951) and The Fall (1956). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and his last novel, The First Man, unfinished at the time of his death, appeared in print for the first time in 1994, and was published in English soon after by Hamish Hamilton. Sandra Smith was born and raised in New York City and is a Fellow of Robinson College, University of Cambridge, where she teaches French Literature and Language. She has won the French American Foundation Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize, as well as the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.
About the Author
Works, such as the novelsThe Stranger(1942) andThe Plague(1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopherAlbert Camusconcern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel Prize of 1957 for literature.Origin and his experiences of this representative of non-metropolitan literature in the 1930s dominated influences in his thought and work.He also adapted plays ofPedro Calderón de la Barca,Lope de Vega,Dino Buzzati, andRequiem for a NunofWilliam Faulkner. One may trace his enjoyment of the theater back to his membership in l'Equipe, an Algerian group, whose "collective creation"Révolte dans les Asturies(1934) was banned for political reasons.Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest, he came at the age of 25 years in 1938; only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation served as a columnist for the newspaperCombat.The essayLe Mythe de Sisyphe(The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942, expounds notion of acceptance of the absurd of Camus with "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction."Meursault, central character ofL'Étranger(The Stranger), 1942, illustrates much of this essay: man as the nauseated victim of the absurd orthodoxy of habit, later - when the young killer faces execution - tempted by despair, hope, and salvation.Besides his fiction and essays, Camus very actively produced plays in the theater (e.g.,Caligula, 1944).The time demanded his response, chiefly in his activities, but in 1947, Camus retired from political journalism.Doctor Rieux ofLa Peste(The Plague), 1947, who tirelessly attends the plague-stricken citizens of Oran, enacts the revolt against a world of the absurd and of injustice, and confirms words: "We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them."People also well knowLa Chute(The Fall), work of Camus in 1956.Camus authoredL'Exil et le royaume(Exile and the Kingdom) in 1957. His austere search for moral order found its aesthetic correlative in the classicism of his art. He styled of great purity, intense concentration, and rationality.Camus died at the age of 46 years in a car accident near Sens in le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin.Chinese阿尔贝·加缪
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