The stranger

"Mama died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

Originally published in 1942, The Stranger is Albert Camus' first novel and one of his most emblematic works. Now with a new Spanish translation by María Teresa Gallego Urrutia and Amaya García Gallego, this seminal book for 20th-century culture is set in Algeria and narrates the anodyne life of Meursault, a young office worker who lives in perpetual apathy. When he receives the news of his mother's death, he takes it with the utmost impassivity. Forced to leave the capital and travel to attend the funeral, Meursault wishes for the ceremony to be brief so he can return home. This existential indifference marks his days, moving forward without reacting to his mother's death, to his beloved's affection, or even to a crime he will commit with identical nonchalance, incapable of seeing the moral scope of his actions.

Camus masterfully portrays the indolence of 20th-century man, a man who cannot find his place, a stranger in his own world. This skeptical and dispassionate character who has abandoned his condition as an autonomous subject remains an essential literary and existential reference today.