In the closing days of World War II, the American publisher Alfred A. Knopf was pursuing English-language rights to Albert Camus’s novel “The Plague,” with its powerful and clear allegorical view of Nazism. With hesitation, he also acquired Camus’s first novel, “The Stranger,” which one reader at the company described as “pleasant, unexciting reading” that seemed “neither very important nor very memorable.”
The novel went on to become, by consensus, one of the most important and memorable books of the 20th century. Alice Kaplan, in the prologue to “Looking for ‘The Stranger,’” her new history of Camus’s profoundly influential debut, writes that critics have seen the novel variously as “a colonial allegory, an existential prayer book, an indictment of conventional morality, a study in alienation, or ‘a Hemingway rewrite of Kafka.’” This “critical commotion,” in Ms. Kaplan’s phrasing, “is one mark of a masterpiece.”
Ms. Kaplan sets out to tell “the story of exactly how Camus created this singular book.” It’s a story that unfolded against one of the most dramatic backdrops in history.
In his mid-20s when we meet him in 1939, Camus was a hugely ambitious, if yet to be published, writer living in his native Algeria. He was working on a novel he would abandon titled “A Happy Death”; a play about the emperor Caligula; and a philosophical essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” He would soon add the germinal ideas of “The Stranger” to that mix.
Camus, though, as is well known, was a man involved in the world, not a writer locked in his room, and his story is deeply entwined with the complex political climate in French-ruled Algeria during the time that France was occupied by the Nazis. Ms. Kaplan, a professor of French at Yale, is the acclaimed author of several previous books, including the memoir “French Lessons” and “Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis.” To this new project, she brings equally honed skills as a historian, literary critic and biographer.
We learn extensively about Camus’s relationships with his family and with fellow writers; about his activities as an anti-fascist; and about what led to everything in “The Stranger,” from the rhythm of its sentences to the conception of the unforgettable scene in which a sun-dazed Meursault murders an Arab on the beach.
Indicative of Ms. Kaplan’s approach is the chapter on Camus’s time as a court reporter for the anticolonial newspaper Alger-Républicain in the late 1930s. The experience gave him a front-row seat in “a theater for the tensions and dramas of a society structured on inequality.” It also provided him specific material for “The Stranger,” like the scene in which a judge waves a crucifix at Meursault and insists that he believe in Christian forgiveness.
“The Stranger” was the first work of fiction to fully convey the icy alienation of existentialism. (Camus didn’t like the E word, but the shoe fits, and snugly.) This slim, spartan novel’s antecedents were garishly voice-driven by comparison. The unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground” has an often spirited, wisecracking relationship with the reader. (“In my soul I have never been a coward, though I constantly turned coward in reality, but — don’t laugh too quickly, there’s an explanation for that; rest assured, I have an explanation for everything.”) The protagonist of Sartre’s “Nausea,” published in 1938, just four years before “The Stranger,” is more akin to Dostoevsky’s garrulous, opinionated guide than to Camus’s detached antihero. (“To think that there are idiots who get consolation from the fine arts.”)
Those books might have been fixated on the emptiness of existence, but they entertained us as they sounded our hollows. Meursault, the protagonist of “The Stranger,” isn’t cranky, defiant or darkly funny good company. Ms. Kaplan describes him as “incapable of empathy.” “That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her,” he recounts. “I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to.”
Meursault’s blankness has continually drawn readers and critics hoping to fill him in. This fascination has been joined by increasing interest in — and frustration with — the blankness of the unnamed Arab stranger killed by Meursault.
The lack of a name for the Arab could be seen as simply underscoring the meaningless absurdity of his death. But such a reading would be helped if Meursault’s own existence lacked a deeper meaning; harder to countenance when, for instance, Camus once described him as “the only Christ we deserve.”
Toward the end of her book, Ms. Kaplan writes about Kamel Daoud, whose 2015 novel, “The Meursault Investigation,” put the Arab at center stage. It gave him a name, Musa, a family and his own experience of life in French-ruled Algeria. Then, in an epilogue, Ms. Kaplan goes a step further and looks for the identity of the Arab involved in the real-life altercation (in which no one died) that inspired the novel’s pivotal scene. What she learns about him is fascinating, and how she writes about parallels between him and Camus is a lovely example of her own imaginative powers and stylish prose.
Not all of the details in this book about a book are equally gripping, but Ms. Kaplan mostly keeps momentum by adhering to her plan to write about Camus “as though I were looking over his shoulder.”
Reading “The Stranger” is a bracing but somewhat bloodless experience. Ms. Kaplan has hung warm flesh on its steely bones.
Looking for ‘The Stranger’
Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic
By Alice Kaplan
Illustrated. 289 pages. The University of
Chicago Press. $26.
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