Graham Marks's story about The Outsider
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Author: Albert Camus
SynopsisMeursault leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life in Algiers until he commits a random act of violence. His lack of emotion and failure to show remorse only serve to increase his guilt in the eyes of the law, and challenges the fundamental values of society – a set of rules so binding that any person breaking them is condemned as an outsider. The Outsider is a classic existentialist novel
My Story
The Book That Changed My Life...just one? I don’t think I can make that kind of choice, there have been so many books that have had positive and long-lasting effects on me – from my youth, when Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda captivated me with its mixture of fantasy and high adventure; a few years later John Buchan’s Greenmantle and Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands introduced me to the world of espionage which I’ve loved ever since (I have my own homage to these books, I Spy, coming out from Usborne this August). As an older teen I found a place I belonged in Albert Camus’ The Outsider, and a real sense of understanding in DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers; In my mid to late 20s John Irving’s The World According to Garp and Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction just pinned me to the wall with their brilliance. All these books, and more, have moved me, taught me, amused and amazed me and all are unforgettable. If you were to twist my arm and make me choose just one book I would, under intense pressure, aver that reading The Outsider when I did, as an angst-ridden 15 year-old, didn’t quite save my life but it was a revelation; the world, my world, made more sense after I’d finished it. And you cannot ask more of a book than that.
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