A compelling companion to a novel that has stayed strange.
The fascinating story behind Albert Camus’ coldblooded masterpiece.
Ever since its 1942 publication, The Stranger has been a murder mystery in more ways than one: we know whodunit, we just don’t know why. The narrator, Meursault, is a killer without a motive; after the unprovoked shooting of an Arab, he goes to trial offering neither remorse nor defense and awaits execution in a jail cell consoled only by his bull-headed refusal to play his designated role. In this swiftly told, deeply researched literary investigation, Kaplan (Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, 2012, etc.) pieces together the creation of the novel, its connection to colonialism, and how it has been interpreted ever since. The plot evolved from both notebook jottings (“Story: the man who doesn’t want to justify himself”) and events Camus witnessed as a reporter in Nazi-occupied Algeria; the spare, simple style was the result of years of painstaking rewriting. The first critics noted traces of James M. Cain and Franz Kafka, and Jean-Paul Sartre saw, or imagined, only the influence of himself and wrote a critique that turned The Stranger into the book that introduced existentialism to the West. (Camus, for his part, thought the book “anti-existentialist.”) Kaplan can be overly effusive at times—it overstates the case to say the novel “would change the history of modern literature”—but she assembles the facts with astute narrative skill. She is driven by the novel’s many abiding puzzles: who or what does Meursault represent? Is he a man who finds his own solipsistic integrity in the face of an irrational universe, or is he just a callous sociopath? While she doesn’t offer any final interpretation, her detective work deepens the understanding of a work whose power resides as much in what it doesn’t say as what it does.
A compelling companion to a novel that has stayed strange.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-226-24167-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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