Books

FIRST EDITION OF ONE OF THE DEFINING NOVELS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. "From its cold opening lines, 'Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure,' to its bleak concluding image of a public execution set to take place beneath the 'benign indifference of the universe,' Camus's first and most famous novel takes the form of a terse, flat, first-person narrative by its main character Meursault, a very ordinary young man of unremarkable habits and unemotional affect who, inexplicably and in an almost absent-minded way, kills an Arab and then is arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The neutral style of the novel-typical of what the critic Roland Barthes called 'writing degree zero'-serves as a perfect vehicle for the descriptions and commentary of its anti-hero narrator, the ultimate 'outsider' and a person who seems to observe everything, including his own life, with almost pathological detachment" (David Simpson). Note: With the fictitious "Quatrième édition" on the title page and rear wrapper. The 4400 copies of the first printing were issued on the same day. There were eight different title pages and rear wrappers, however, used as a marketing ploy, implying (falsely) that there were eight different editions. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1957 was awarded to Albert Camus "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times". Paris: Gallimard, 1942. Original wrappers; glassine (probably not original glassine); housed in custom half-morocco box with chemise. Some soiling to wrappers, particularly on the spine (spine also with edgewear); small tear at bottom right front wrapper and chipping at bottom right edge. A very good copy, rare in original wrappers.

L'Etranger (The Stranger) is a novel by French author Albert Camus published in 1942. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus's philosophy of the absurd and existentialism, though Camus personally rejected the latter label.