Why the hell do people gush all over The Stranger?

Is such a vapid, shitty book with equally bad writing. There is nothing profound about it, yet Redditors and Veeky Forums rate it so highly. The subject matter is something found in literally every existential book you read, or is taken as already known.

The book can be summed up as "life is absurd, nothing really matters, get over it."

>just that life is absurd
this is a profound idea. the book wrestles with it.

>why bother with the original when other people have copied it?

Camus BTFO

Wow really makes u think

the reason is because normies, liberals, women, and nonwhites. They are to blame, my friend

Just as I thought.

>Veeky Forums rate it so highly
no we don't

It's a good book Bront.

>with equally bad writing

The writing is purposely simple in order to better convey the animal characteristics of the hedonist lifestyle. The character fulfills one physiological urge only to move on to the next one etc.

If you want better writing, read literally anything else he wrote.

It has god tier prose desu

Maybe the ideas it grapples with are too advanced for your level of learning? Try starting with something more agreeable before you try to expound deeper material.

It's very stylish and attractive

Did you read it in translation? I found it much more enjoyable in French.

It is better heard spoken in any language by someone who understands it. It is a piece of emotional artistry that requires more than the structure of normative interpretation to apprehend.

This.

Camus's writing is similar to J. K. Rowling's.

This is true. It was a performance originally.

So is this constantly the same faggot with these bait threads or does every 16 year old who didn't get babbies first philosophical novel feel the need to rant about it on Veeky Forums (mind you, never with any real criticism, jut whiny posts about how overrated it is)

Wrong.

Oh I forgot JK is the go to whipping girl isn't she, so anything like her writing must be bad/terrible right, terrible contrarian we got here, rebel rebel

>Calling people redditors while having a reddit-tier understanding of how ideas progress over time

The mere fact that Camus' ideas have been so thoroughly internalized by society that they seem self-evident should indicate to you that his writing is worth reading.

Up until the 90's the Beats were considered the height of twentieth century literature by many, especially developing academia. It was even enough to get the book into some high school courses, greatly exacerbating the problem. Then, it didn't end up happening, and the beats fell out of favor in a big way (in part because their writing is mechanically disgusting and dully self-indulgent) and nobody knows what to look back on since there's no modern literary tradition set in stone and postmodernists (Pynchon, Calvino, etc) are difficult to have discussions about and full of bait-and-switch dead ends.

it's an incredibly subversive piece on post-colonial relations if you really think about it- this is often missed.

>Looking back now, the real topic of “The Stranger” is painfully obvious. Camus and the French had a demographic problem. They were going to have to give up some prime Mediterranean beachfront. Which is why the idiot protagonist kills an Arab on the beach and gets himself executed. Spoiler alert: That’s the plot of “The Stranger.” French mama’s boy kills Arab on beach, whiles away the time in prison waiting to be guillotined thinking about…you know, I can’t even remember what he was thinking about. That’s probably because, like almost all the leftist European rhetoric of the postwar years, “The Stranger” is totally disingenuous. It can’t just come out and say, “God damn it, we like this beach! We conquered this beach! Why we gotta give up all this nice beach just because you Arabs are out-breeding us?” You look back now and it’s obvious that’s what Camus, a French Algerian (a now extinct tribe), was writing about. Normal tribal behavior, resorting to violence when you’re losing coveted territory. But God forbid Camus should talk that way out loud back in those post-Stalingrad days when everything was moral, except the nonstop lying.

>Camus was a little more honest than Sartre—Titus Oates was more honest than Sartre—but not honest enough to say that the issue was demographics and beachfront. Nobody was, until Houllebecq, the first honest French writer since Celine, created “Bruno,” the kid warped forever by losing his home in Algeria. It’s a sad decline for a nation that once produced writers like La Mettrie, honest as sulfuric acid. All that courage died in Stalingrad, and in Camus’ day the only real purpose of European lit was to fill pages, make your rep, and say “Not a fascist, not a fascist” enough times that the Sovok critics in Paris believed you. And that, my friends, is how “existentialism” was born: As a way of not saying what really mattered, what was actually in everybody’s face in Europe from 1945 onward. When you can’t say what matters and you’ve got an intellectual ego the size of Jupiter, you’ve got a lot of pages to fill, and the time-tested way is a mix of over-writing and ultra-violence. Just ask our own domestic crafter of artisanal prose, Cormac (ne “Charlie”) McCarthy, about that.

Is this bait