Extract

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.

A man buries his mother one afternoon and kills an Arab on a sun-drenched beach the next, and the world demands to know why. Meursault refuses the question. Albert Camus, writing in occupied France at twenty-eight, fashioned a novel so spare it reads like a fever dream in bright light, every sentence stripped to its nerve. The prose is flat yet devastating, each declarative clause a refusal of the narratives society wraps around experience. Meursault's crime is not murder but honesty: he will not pretend to feel what convention requires. At his trial it is his dry eyes at the funeral, not the gunshots, that condemn him. The book remains the purest distillation of the absurd ever committed to fiction, a parable about a man who will not lie.