Book a Week 2016 - BW21: Middle of the World

[Kathleen.]

I read "James Madison" by Richard Brookhiser and my 10yo read "Who Was Joan of Arc" by Pam Pollack.

☺

[Robin M]

Yeah for three day weekends. it's been a full week of being on and people and busyness and now I have an introvert hangover. I'm decompressing today and so happy we have a long weekend. Did nothing today except read - finished the last book in Stacia Kane's Downside Ghost Series and write up the post for Sunday.  

[Stacia]

Spent a lovely few hours whiling away the time on the screen porch while finishing The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Though I know next to nothing about the Mahabharata (&, more specifically, the Bhagavad Gita), I very much enjoyed this modernized version of the classic epic. It makes me want to learn & know more about the original. Thanks again, Rose, for the heads-up on this one. I think this is a book that would appeal to other BaWers too -- maybe Ali in OR & Onceuponatime, perhaps Angel too.

 

And in my continued light/escapist reading ( :tongue_smilie:  haha), I picked up Albert Camus' The Stranger, mostly because I picked up The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud at the library this week. Since I had never read The Stranger, I figured I had better start with it, then follow with Daoud's book.

 

The Stranger:

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.

 

The Meursault Investigation:

A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 â€” Michiko Kakutani, The Top Books of 2015, New York Times â€” TIME Magazine Top Ten Books of 2015 â€” Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year â€” Financial Times Best Books of the Year

“A tour-de-force reimagining of Camus’s The Stranger, from the point of view of the mute Arab victims.†—The New Yorker
 
He was the brother of “the Arab†killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus’s classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling’s memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name—Musa—and describes the events that led to Musa’s casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach.
               
In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his broken heart, on his anger with men desperate for a god, and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A stranger among his own people, he wants to be granted, finally, the right to die.
               
The Stranger is of course central to Daoud’s story, in which he both endorses and criticizes one of the most famous novels in the world. A worthy complement to its great predecessor, The Meursault Investigation is not only a profound meditation on Arab identity and the disastrous effects of colonialism in Algeria, but also a stunning work of literature in its own right, told in a unique and affecting voice.

 

Edited May 29, 2016 by Stacia

[Stacia]

Mothersweets, what a gorgeous shawl pattern!

 

Kim, so good to see you popping in!

 

Crstarlette, glad to hear you are loving A Moveable Feast. It's on my favorites list after reading it last year.

[Mothersweets]

Thank you! I'm hoping I can finish it in time - it's been slow going.

[Robin M]

Link to week 22 - please continue conversation in new thread