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Over the last couple of days, I finally found the time to leaf rather lazily through a copy of Albert Camus' The Outsider (1942), which has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf for the past six months or so. When I say that I "found the time" what I really mean, and what I suspect most people mean by this particular phrase, is that I finally mustered the effort required to commit myself to something outside of my everyday routine. And yet even so, The Outsider hardly battles to keep the reader's interest. Rather, it gently ebbs and flows with the same stark indifference displayed by its seemingly dispassionate protagonist. As a result, I found my thoughts occasionally drifting away from those of Meursault before casually picking up where I had left off half a page later; none the wiser to his predicament during my impromptu interval and none too concerned either. Whilst this may seem like a damning indictment of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated philosophical novels, perhaps I am giving you the wrong impression?
