John Williams of the New York Times checks out Alice Kaplan's "Looking for the Stranger" in NY1's The Book Reader.
Albert Camus’s landmark existential novel “The Stranger” is the story of an emotionally detached narrator convicted of killing an unnamed Arab man on a beach. When the American publisher Knopf was considering whether to publish the book in English, one reader at the company called it “unexciting reading” that seemed “neither very important nor very memorable.”
The novel went on to become, by consensus, one of the most important and memorable books of the 20th century.
In “Looking for The Stranger,” Alice Kaplan tells the story of the creation, publication and ongoing life of Camus’s profoundly influential debut. It’s a story that began against one of the most dramatic backdrops in history.
Camus was a man deeply involved in the world, and his story is entwined with the complex political climate in French-ruled Algeria during the time that France was occupied by the Nazis. Kaplan is the acclaimed author of several previous books, and she brings her well-honed skills as a historian, literary critic and biographer to this project.
Not all of the details in this book about a book are equally gripping, but Kaplan maintains momentum by keeping to her plan to write about Camus “as though I were looking over his shoulder.”