He then befriends Raymond, a pimp who beats his Arab girlfriend. They have a romance, but he seems indifferent to marriage. He smokes heavily and takes his lover, Marie, to a comic film the next day. Meursault attends his mother’s funeral and falls asleep at the all-night vigil. The opening sentence, “Mother died, today” (“Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte”), has joined a list of classic lines in world literature. The protagonist is Meursault (“Mer-so”), an indifferent French Algerian described as “a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa,” a man who lacks any hostility toward or empathy for other human beings. The plot of “The Stranger” is simple enough. Born in French Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus (Ca-moo) won the Nobel Prize for literature at age 43. “The Stranger” (L’Étranger) by Albert Camus is a novel that spoke to a generation of French people under Nazi occupation in 1942, but its themes of absurdity in an existential world have made “The Stranger” an enduring classic. Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” (1926) spoke to its “lost generation” and still finds readers. Some novels endure the brutal test of time.
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