Camus' The Stranger and reading

This is a chat message written to my friend Lavinia, slightly edited. Sometimes I’m the type for long texts.

Yesterday I started reading “The Stranger” by Albert Camus. I had already mentioned to you that I had studied the author in high school, and moreover the reviews generally said it was one of the most important novels in European literature and that it deserved attention, so having a copy of mine at home in Italian I decided to venture into it.

Although this morning I also went out with Giuliano, today in just a few hours I managed to read the remaining 110 pages I had left, and I finished it completely. It was a huge achievement for me, something truly wonderful: it had been years and years since I finished reading a book.

The novel is beautiful. It’s one of the principal works of existentialism, a philosophical-literary movement that involves, speaking of francophone writers, both Camus and Sartre. I don’t want to tell you much about the synopsis or give you a complete analysis, because for obvious reasons it would be hell to communicate them in chat with the fear of not providing a faithful perspective of the novel and the ideas behind it.

Albert Camus’ skill, however, lies in transmitting the emotions or rather the lack of emotions of the book’s protagonist in an excellent way. You really manage to enter the character’s mind and understand him, despite his cosmic incomprehension, despite his being indifferent and lost towards anything or anyone, despite his emptiness of “soul.” His lack of emotions and estrangement from conventional social standards are precisely the things that make his humanity and his existence.

I feel truly reborn. It wasn’t so much reading this specific book, which I nonetheless liked in an indescribable way, but rather the process that reading has restarted in me. Reading that I repeat in these years, or perhaps never in my life, has played an important and decisive role.

While I was reading it, I transformed into a concentrated person, not distracted, productive, passionate, creative. I devoured the pages without ever having the need to consult a PC or a cell phone. For the first time in a while I saw myself completely “shipwrecked” in reading and my thoughts. It seemed like entering Plato’s world of Ideas. I was in a state of “depth” that, while not foreign to me, this time was different: fully creative, productive, beautiful. For example, various reflections on myself and on life came to mind that I was able to put in writing without any problem, things that normally, as you also tell me, I would never consider myself capable or worthy of allowing myself.

The real realization, however, was not, I repeat, specific to reading. Today thanks to reading I felt like a concentrated person in general, not distracted, not lazy, for whom hours didn’t pass without being able to grasp them but on the contrary I felt like master of time.