El extranjero

Originally published in 1942, The Stranger is Albert Camus's first novel and one of his most iconic works. Now with a new Spanish translation by María Teresa Gallego Urrutia and Amaya García Gallego, this capital book for 20th century culture takes place in Algeria and narrates the bland life of Meursault, a young office worker who lives in perpetual apathy. When he receives the news of his mother's passing, he accepts her with the utmost impassivity. Forced to leave the capital and travel to attend her funeral, Meursault wants the ceremony to be short in order to return to his home. That existential indifference marks his days, advancing without reacting to the death of his mother, to the affection of his beloved, and not even to a crime that he will commit with identical laziness, unable to see the moral significance of the acts of him. Camus masterfully portrays the indolence of the twentieth century man, a man who cannot find his place, a foreigner in his own world. This skeptical and dispassionate character who has abandoned his status as an autonomous subject remains today an essential literary and existential reference.