Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don’t know.”
With these chilling words, which open Albert Camus’ epochal 1942 novel L’Etranger, Camus enunciated a new style of writing, one that indexed the disaffected soul of his anti-hero Meursault, a man who can’t feel emotions the way the rest of us do.
Meursault is subsequently sentenced to death for the shooting of an Arabic man on a beach in French-occupied Algiers under a blazing sun that partly blinds him. He can’t feel guilt for this any more than he can grieve for his mother. But Meursault is a gentle soul, a lover of nature and a brutally honest person, which Camus’ elliptical prose – described by one commentator as “Sartre crossed with Hemingway” – perfectly captured.
His novel became the must-read text of its time. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it myself – even once in the original French, something I never attempted with any book before. Each reading threw up some new epiphany.
The book revolutionised both literature and the way we look at life. It’s still talked about today as a seminal work that cut to the core of modern man’s dissociation of sensibility. It was as emblematic an influence on the existential movement as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was on the hippie cult a decade or so later. Meursault, like Kerouac’s Sal Paradise – or indeed J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye” – touched chords in the collective psyche that haven’t been rivalled almost a century on.
L’Etranger was first filmed by Luchino Visconti in 1967, Marcello Mastroianni essaying the role of the menial clerk who doesn’t seem to care about anything beyond his immediate circumstances. He’s content to just drift along with things with his girlfriend Maria until his life spirals out of control, forcing him to confront the more substantive issues of ethics, free will, religion and the ultimate meaning of life.
Zeki Demirkubuz re-made it in 2001 as Yazgi (Fate). This third iteration, directed by Francois Ozon, is showing as part of the French Festival in the Irish Film Institute on November 22 and 27.
You may also be interested in other films from the festival, like Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, an hommage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. It also has Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, featuring Jodie Foster in her first major French-speaking role.
On general release there’s A Quiet Love, a documentary concerning three deaf couples. They circumvent various obstacles to express that love, be they religious, parental or athletic. Garry Keane, directing, turns the sound down – or off – occasionally to have us experience life as they do.
Christy, not to be confused with the Brendan Canty film of the same name that I reviewed on this page recently, is the story of Christy Martin. An American, she put women’s boxing on the map long before anyone ever heard of Katie Taylor or Kellie Harrington.
