![]() ![]() Or was it cloudy?" And yet the apprehended city floats before the reader with a limpid and oneiric grace: a self-portrait in a constantly distorting mirror. Adam drifts, benumbed and stoned, through a Madrid that sometimes fails to match the depths of his self-absorption: "I left the hotel and walked into the sun. Meursault is trapped in the sun-dazzle of the moment. ![]() Adam Gordon suffers frequently from linguistic dislocation and – permanently – from bipolarity which he self-medicates with a cocktail of prescription drugs, coffee, nicotine, booze and marijuana. The narrator, Meursault, is a French Algerian whose mother is reported dead in the famous opening sentence later, on a beach, he will murder someone – an Arab, as the song by the Cure reminded us in 1979 – for almost no reason.īen Lerner's remarkable first novel is narrated by a different kind of outsider: a young American living in Madrid on a poetry scholarship in 2004. S eventy years ago Albert Camus published the novel known in English as The Outsider: a short and vivid monologue that – I remember this from school – doubles as some kind of philosophical manifesto. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |