“The Stranger” by Albert Camus
This is a novel about a life lived by someone with a detached moral code and a difficulty to experience, identify, and express emotions.
It is written through the first-person vantage point of the main character, Meursault, who lives in a poor and violent neighbourhood in Algiers, Algeria, but who crucially marches on in his life without attaching meaning (and indeed, emotions) to anything.
And that is what makes his story interesting, considering that his life involves all the spectrum of emotions: romantic relationship, the death of his mother, a psychotic neighbour, a violent friend, and even a deathly encounter with a stranger that involves a murder, all of which he goes through without really a hint of grief, fear, joy, anger, remorse, disgust, sadness, etc.
The narrative itself is quite simple, but filled with so many philosophical interpretation and dilemma, with existentialism theme at its core. Because reading about how Meursault responds to the events of his surrounding can make us think about our place within society, and how meaningful or meaningless events can be if we detach all emotions from it.
It is quite the philosophical journey from a book of only 123 pages long, a book that made Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and, among many others, inspired The Cure to write the song “Killing an Arab.”
And upon further investigation, it is believed that the Meursault character is based on Camus’ real-life friend Galindo, who is an intelligent but odd person that exhibits the social and personal characteristic impairment of Asperger’s syndrome.
THE CHAOS THEORY 