The Outsider by Albert Camus | This is not a Book Review

This was the second time i was reading the book. The first time i read it was during a bout of depression in film school. The copy was one i took from home, tattered.

The second time, i think i read a copy that belongs to my friend, Han. Joseph Laredo translation. So here goes my Camus. (In the period between my read and this note, i have forgotten most of it, thanks to my incorrigible memory issues.)

To be honest, i don't find the much celebrated first line of the book that interesting. It actually sounds natural to me, something i would say if my mother died.

The Outsider's behaviour during his mother's death also only seemed natural to me.

More interesting to me is reading it in India with Narendra Modi as PM, with BJP in power. It is impossible not to shudder thinking of how the state judges people and finishes them off based on events similar to those in this book.

Imagine someone who said 'Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know' who is later found sharing an anti fascist cartoon on their social media page.

Camus' description of old people is also the thing that i notice the most in them. Their eyes. See here, the Outsider talking about his mother's friends at the old age home.

'What struck me most about their faces was that I couldn't see their eyes, but only a faint glimmer among a nest of wrinkles.'

Their eyes grow a little translucent, even Indian eyes turn a bit blue. I remember my the left eye of my favourite person on earth. It was greenish blue with glaucoma. It reminded me of the marbles that used to be found inside soda bottles in the past.

Another of the old people things,

'Except that every now and then I heard a strange noise and I couldn't understand what it was. In the end I realized that some of the old people were sucking at the inside of their mouths and letting out these peculiar clicking noises. They were so absorbed in their thoughts that they weren't aware they were doing it.'

One of the sketches that i have been intending to do for over two years is that of an old man drooling, with his grandson on his lap, also drooling.

'On their way out, and to my great surprise, they all shook hands with me - as though a night spent in silence together had put us on intimate terms.'

Isn't that true? Don't such nights always put strangers on intimate terms? The Outsider has also been translated as 'The Stranger'. 

'... the blood-red earth tumbling onto mother's coffin, the white flesh of the roots mixed in with it,...'

This white flesh of the roots in red earth is one of those images that makes me smell earth and also feel it. All people who were diggers as children would remember a point where they saw the whiteness of that white and took it to be many things, all but roots of a tree or plant.

Coming up is the best murder description ever.

'... And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.'

I don't think this description has ever been outdone in literature. (My knowledge is limited but i will stick to this verdict because I am too proud.). After this line starts Part II and the reader almost feels like they just knocked at the door of unhappiess which was the upcoming page - blank except for the 'Part II' written on top - like a knob or something.

As an addict for over 8 years, i would like to quote the portion below because this is close to how i would describe smoking as - nothing but a disgusting and harmful habit. In jail, deprived of cigarettes, the Outsider says,

'... The first few days were really bad. It was possibly this that shook me up the most. I used to break bits of wood off my bed-plank and suck them. I'd feel permanently sick all day long. I couldn't understand why I was being deprived of something that didn't do anyone any harm. Later on I realized it was all part of the punishment. But by that time I'd got used to not smoking, so for me it was no longer a punishment.'

It is interesting how most of the time, one fails to identify the lack of freedom even in extreme situations like prison. The conversation regarding how prisoners are deprived of sex is where the Outsider realises what imprisonment means.

'...I told him (the warder) that I was like them and that I thought we were treated unfairly. 'Yes,' he said, 'but that's precisely why you're put in prison.' 'What do you mean, that's why?' 'Well, of course. Freedom, that's why. You're deprived of your freedom.' I'd never thought of that. I agreed. 'That's true,' I said, 'otherwise it wouldn't be punishment.' 

There is a mystery portion in the book for me. A reference to something that happened earlier in the book itself. My memory being my memory, i first thought that i'd read it but forgotten but i re-read the entire pages of the mentioned portion and still could not find it.

'...I then remembered what the nurse said at mother's funeral. No, there was no way out and no one can imagine what the evenings in prisons are like.'

I found no reference like that in the entire funeral portion even after going through it twice. Maybe it is meant for a third read.

The trial description is mindblowing. Human beings are not expected to be apathetic. The world can perhaps be divided into those who care about everything and those who don't. Or more relevant would be the division into those who care about certain things and those don't care about the same things - death, for example. The world's cruel assumption is that everyone has to deal with grief in a similar, conventional, acceptable fashion.

This is a burden on those who are alone. Haven't you noticed how loners are different in their grief? And by loners, i don't mean people who live alone or have no friends, i mean loners, like the Outsider. They end up being judged, for no fault of theirs. In the trial, for example, after the warden of the old age home gives his testimony of how the Outsider did not cry or look at his dead mother's body, how he did not know how old she was and generally appeared calm during her funeral, Camus writes thus.

'Then he (the judge) asked the Public Prosecutor whether he had any questions to put to the witness and the prosecutor exclaimed, 'Oh! no, that's quite sufficient,' in a resounding voice and with such a triumphant glance in my direction that, for the first time in years, I stupidly felt like crying because I could tell how much all these people hated me.'

Isn't it scary? Once you kill someone, our drinking coffee, or watching a film or having sex on the day someone dear to us died, will all add up as 'evidence'? It means that those of us who have been that way are getting away with it only because we have not been brought under the scrutiny of the state. If you do anything that turns the spotlight to you, and it need not be murder, it could very well be an opinion that does not sit well with the majority, the scrutiny will start and will never end. Till your are 'punished' enough.

The following portion is inexplicably touching

'The hearing was adjourned. For a few brief moments, as i left the Law Courts on my way to the van, I recognized the familiar smells and colours of a summer evening. In the darkness of my mobile prison I rediscovered one by one, as if rising from the depths of my fatigue, all the familiar sounds of a town that I loved and of a certain time of day when I sometimes used to feel happy. The cries of the newspaper sellers in the languid evening air, the last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sanwdich sellers, the moaning of the trams high in the winding streets of the town and the murmuring of the sky before darkness spills over onto the port, all these sound marked out an invisible route which I knew so well before going into prison. Yes, this was the time of day, when, long ago, I used to feel happy. What always awaited me then was a night of easy, dreamless sleep.'  

Again, while his fate is being decided by strangers,

'In the end all I remember is that, echoing towards me from out in the street and crossing the vast expanse of chambers and courtrooms as my lawyer went on talking, came the sound of an ice-cream seller's trumpet. I was assailed by memories of a life which was no longer mine, but in which I'd found my simplest and most lasting pleasures: the smells of summer, the part of town that I loved, the sky on certain evenings, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed. And the utter pointlessness of what I was doing here took me by the throat and all I wanted was to get it over with and go back to my cell and sleep.'

Camus' 'Afterword' is a must read. I don't remember if the other edition that i read had it. In it, he speaks about how he was accused of blasphemy for comparing his character to jesus christ. That whole portion is so sweet that i wrote 'love' at the end of it. See here.

'So one wouldn't be far wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth. I also once said, and again paradoxically, that I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve. It will be understood, after these explanations, that I said it without any intention of blasphemy but simply with the somewhat ironic affection that an artist has a right to feel towards the characters he has created.'

I sometimes wonder what these writers would have written if they lived in our times and then my head spins.