Stranger

From AudioFile Jonathan Davis is a masterful reader whose style meshes beautifully with Albert Camus's French classic. Davis excels with novels full of foreign words and names because his voice has an elegance that brings out the subtleties in every syllable. Camus's existential novel is told from the perspective of Mersault, an Algerian who kills a man and is tried for his crime. Using nuanced inflection, Davis brings out Mersault's lack of emotion relating to his mother's death at the book's beginning and the events that subsequently swallow his life, allowing the reader to focus on his lack of conscience and passion. As a bonus, the audiobook also features a fascinating interview with Professor Martin Stone, a scholar of existentialism. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Product Description A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable. Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end: dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. His confrontation with the gentle indifference of the world remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. Review "Matthew Ward has done Camus and us a great service. This is now a different and better novel for its American readers."