Book Review | The Foreigner

Albert CAMUS [pronounced Albert Kamü] was born in Algeria in 1913. He left his philosophy education at the University of Algiers due to health reasons. He went to Paris in 1938, and his first works, The Other Side and The Wedding, were published during this period. His real entrance into the world of literature was determined by his novel The Stranger, published in 1942, and his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. In these two complementary works, he developed his “absurd” philosophy, which bears existentialist traces. He proved his competence in both literature and thought with his works The Rebel, Summer, The Exile and The Kingdom. His novels The Happy Death and The First Man were published after his death. Albert Camus, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and is today considered one of the most important names in the world of literature and thought in the 20th century, lost his life in a traffic accident in 1960. Samih TİRYAKİOĞLU was born in 1909. After graduating from Galatasaray High School and the IU Institute of Journalism, he worked as a journalist and translator for many years. He became the editor-in-chief of the Hürriyet newspaper and served as the vice president of the International Press Institute (IPI). He translated the works of writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, Joseph Kessel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus into our language. Tiryakioğlu died in 1995.

Subject of the Book

The Stranger, published in 1942, is the first and most influential work of Albert Camus, who was considered the spokesperson and guide of his generation not only in France but also all over the world after World War II as a novelist, playwright, and thinker. The novel tells the story of the 20th century through a “stranger” who is ostracized because he expresses his true feelings rather than a crime he commits and refuses to fit into the mold desired by society. The alienation that the 20th century man fell into is narrated. The novel, which tells the story of the constant search for the elusive “meaning”, the separation of consciousness from society and the outside world, the conflict between the hero who is a stranger to society and his environment and society, derives its fascinating power from the deep and silent pain in the background. Camus masterfully expresses the distance that his young hero Meursault puts between himself and the outside world, his alienation from himself and society, and his objective approach to everything, including his mother’s death.