The Stranger

Born in Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus published The Stranger–now one of the most widely read novels of this century–in 1942. Celebrated in intellectual circles, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.

出版者:Vintage

作者:Albert Camus

页数:144

译者:Matthew Ward

出版时间:1989-3-13

价格:USD 12.95

装帧:Paperback

isbn号码:9780679720201

丛书系列:Vintage Camus

图书标签:AlbertCamus小说哲学法国英文原版外国文学文学英文

The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson

From Library Journal

The new translation of Camus's classic is a cultural event; the translation of Cocteau's diary is a literary event. Both translations are superb, but Ward's will affect a naturalized narrative, while Browner's will strengthen Cocteau's reemerging critical standing. Since 1946 untold thousands of American students have read a broadly interpretative, albeit beautifully crafted British Stranger . Such readers have closed Part I on "door of undoing" and Part II on "howls of execration." Now with the domestications pruned away from the text, students will be as close to the original as another language will allow: "door of unhappiness" and "cries of hate." Browner has no need to "write-over" another translation. With Cocteau's reputation chiefly as a cineaste until recently, he has been read in French or not at all. Further, the essay puts a translator under less pressure to normalize for readers' expectations. Both translations show the current trend to stay closer to the original. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY at Binghamton

Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and ­devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.” –from the Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie

From the Hardcover edition.

Description

Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)

Original Language: French

From the Inside Flap

Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward.

读后感

1、加缪生于1913年，法国人，存在主义哲学家、文学家，1957年也就是他44岁的时候获得诺贝尔文学奖，这是迄今为止法国最年轻的诺贝尔文学奖得主，一般都是一些德高望重的老头子得奖，有的快要入土了，有的卧病在床，只能请人代领奖金，这是我见到的唯一一位在四十多岁就问鼎这个...  

1、加缪生于1913年，法国人，存在主义哲学家、文学家，1957年也就是他44岁的时候获得诺贝尔文学奖，这是迄今为止法国最年轻的诺贝尔文学奖得主，一般都是一些德高望重的老头子得奖，有的快要入土了，有的卧病在床，只能请人代领奖金，这是我见到的唯一一位在四十多岁就问鼎这个...  

你有没有尝试过从悬崖绝壁的顶端往下跳？ 应该没有。 为什么？ 因为你会死。我也会，所有人都会。 答案既简单又神秘深奥。在我们同狩猎采集为生的祖先分道扬镳的几千年里，许多人在不停地探索这些自然科学的奥秘。这些奥秘与自然界的客观规律有关。值得庆幸的是，从牛顿力学到...  

“妈妈一定感受到了解脱，因而准备再重新过一遍。任何人，任何人都没有权利哭她。而我，我现在也感到自己准备好把一切再过一遍。”——《局外人》 坦白说不知道该从什么角度来谈加缪，也不知道该怎么聊这本书，所以借鉴之前看马原的讲义，他说的是一个小说的9种写法（或者叫死...  

读客这个版本，除了外书皮很难看之外，样样都不错： 译文——是一个全新的译本，流畅干净，窃以为比郭宏安的好； 内封面——黑色的硬精装上镌着加缪的头像，沉稳漂亮； 腰封——在腰封直接印上了我的ID，虽然知道这是定向赠书，但还是开心，于是这成了我拿到一本新书后唯一没有...

用户评价

我当时写essay找教授说我根本没有感受这样的strangeness（其实以前应该有过） 教授说: that's because you are mentally healthy! 哈哈哈哈笑死我了

毕业回国的飞机上读的。十二个小时的飞机一大半都在哭，哭累了看，看累了睡，睡醒了哭。I knew that a part of me had died.

结构很完美

Don't really like the absurd hero.

读至最后一行才想起在大学里的第一年曾在图书馆翻过一遍中译的[收录在一本封皮都没有了的旧版本里]，在那时候我碰巧也喜欢用那主人公式的局外人视角看待世界的种种荒谬。今天再看的时候最喜欢的是在监狱里的那一段描写，如何在躯体受限的状态下处理时间。