L’Etranger.

First edition of which no large paper copies were issued, with fictitious mention of 4^th edition.

“A man speaks, but his I has no face, only a name: Meursault, and fragmentary sensations, noted as they are in the moment. Meursault is going to bury his mother: he watches, he listens, he smokes, passively. He does not participate; he answers and that is all. The next day he meets Marie, bathes with her, sleeps with her, without wanting anything, simply because she is there, and because he answers to what questions him. The same goes for Raymond, his neighbour, who asks for his friendship, and whom he helps, just as one responds to someone who speaks to you insistently, without thinking anything in particular. And life flows on, pushing the days, the work, the sun, the sea, all things that Meursault observes with an empty and lucid consciousness, all things that reflect on him but to which he does not give himself […].

The immense success of ‘L’Etranger’ is no accident. This book held up to its time a mirror of its own condition, of which the war had just revealed to it the absurdity. A character out of step with the world, with others and with himself, a character without hope or resignation, Meursault embodied for the first time the absurd man (or rather the nakedness of man in the face of the absurd), and he had all the more power in that he arose from a fictional creation that was alive in itself, and strong in an evidence that escaped the thesis from which it was derived. Indeed, although Meursault is the product of a thought, he is above all a presence, and born of the novelist’s art alone. This presence shows us the absurdity of the world, it does not demonstrate it; it founds it and it is up to us to deduce the notion. Hence the extreme power of this book, which acts as a revelator, and whose style closely matches its subject. Short and neutral, the sentences are there to suggest to us that the absurd man can only describe, live on the level of pure existence, start again at every moment, without duration, without ‘connection’. And the success of this style is total, which gives us both the brilliance of the moment and its lesson.” (Dictionnaire des Œuvres, II, 777).

Albert Camus’s first novel is still today the best-selling work of French literature in the world.

Beautiful wide-margined copy as preserved in wrappers, of the indisputable French best-seller.