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Title: highly over-rated but intriguing short novel
Review: Though Camus is an exceptional prose stylist he is no thinker and this is never more clear than in The Stranger. Walter Kaufmann has noted the general vacuity of Camus' thought in his (Kaufmann's) prolific criticism on existentialism. Philip Freund, in his meticulously long essay "Albert Camus and Symbolism" (in The Art of Reading the Novel) has convincingly demonstrated the alarmingly weak structural integrity of much of Camus' fictional work. I recommend The Stranger as an experiment, as it incidentally yields some intriguing insights; but I qualify this recommendation as, architectonically (inclusive of plot execution, coherence of symbolism, philosophical cogency) The Stranger, largely, is a failure.
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