Man in a Vacuum

THE STRANGER (154 pp.)--Albert Camus--Translated by Stuart Gilber--Knopf ($2).

The latest highbrow buzz-fuzz is something called "existentialism" (TIME, Jan. 28). This short novel by 32-year-old French philosopher-journalist Albert Camus may help to clear the fog.

Camus, who is now on a U.S. lecture tour, has denied that he is an existentialist. He is nevertheless closely identified with this French literary cult, and The Stranger is right in its groove: "existential" pessimism underlines every cold, gross, irrational detail of the story.

Camus' point seems to be that the world makes no sense, that life as it has to be lived by human beings adds up to almost exactly nothing. In an essay called The Myth of Sisyphus, he once asserted that the only important philosophical problem confronting humanity is that of suicide. The Stranger, despite its simple and vivid writing, is about as negative and futile.

Trigger Man. Meursault, the central character in the story, is a clerk. He lives in Algiers (where Camus himself was born). One day, on a beach just outside the city, he murders a man, for no particular reason. He is arrested and sentenced to die on the guillotine.

As Camus pictures him, Meursault is neither crazy nor criminal; nor is he a conscious rebel protesting against the pressures of society. He is simply a person who "exists," a man to whom nothing really matters. He has no positive beliefs, political or nonpolitical. Before committing the murder, he goes about his daily work, makes friends casually, attends his mother's funeral casually, casually promises to marry a girl. When the time comes. he quite as casually pulls the trigger of the revolver. Meursault does not regret it. Murder, he feels, makes no difference, for everything in life comes "to absolutely the same thing" in the end.

It is quite a trick to write of life & death, as Camus does, in terms of an almost total social and moral vacuum. He may get philosophical satisfaction from it. Most readers will call it philosophic doodling.

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