Just Because: 'The Stranger'

Writer and philosopher Albert Camus would have been 100 years old on Nov. 7 had he not died in a car accident at the age of 46. The Nobel Prize winner was born in 1913 in Algeria, which at the time was called French Algeria. It was the setting of his two most famous novels, The Stranger and The Plague, and several essays. The country he grew up in and describes in his works no longer exists, and in most ways that's a good thing. Like South Africa, it was really two countries in one, and that has colored the way many Algerians and French today regard the author: http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/11/07/243536815/on-his-100th-birthday-camus-algerian-ties-still-controversial
   Here is the way Camus' classic The Stranger begins (this translation, by Matthew Ward, is, IMHO, the best, most accurate one):

PART ONE

1

   Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
   The old people's home is at Marengo, about eighty kilometers from Algiers. I'll take the two o'clock bus and get there in the afternoon. That way I can be there for the vigil and come back tomorrow night. I asked my boss for two days off and there was no way he was going to refuse me with an excuse like that. But he wasn't too happy about it. I even said, "It's not my fault." He didn't say anything. Then I thought I shouldn't have said
that. After all, I didn't have anything to apologize for. He's the one who should have offered his condolences. But he probably will day after tomorrow, when he sees I'm in mourning. For now, it's almost as if Maman weren't dead. After the funeral, though, the case will be closed, and everything will have a more official feel to it.
   I caught the two o'clock bus. It was very hot. I ate at the restaurant, at Céleste's, as usual. Everybody felt very sorry for me, and Céleste said, "You only have one mother." When I left, they walked me to the door. I was a little distracted because I still had to go up to Emmanuel's place to borrow a black tie and an arm band. He lost his uncle a few months back.
   I ran so as not to miss the bus. It was probably because of all the rushing around, and on top of that the bumpy ride, the smell of gasoline, and the glare of the sky and the road, that I dozed off. I slept almost the whole way. And when I woke up, I was slumped against a soldier who smiled at me and asked if I'd been traveling long. I said, "Yes," just so I wouldn't have to say anything else.
   ...