I had a review of Camus' famous novel accepted by Amazon, which can be seen here with the given title, Outside the Inside. My short yet exquisite piece speaks for itself, though I would like to mention my personal admiration for the educating lines, "Existential means to do with existing and this book is to do with the existence of the lead character who is basically an outsider. Read it and think." The one thing that surprises me is that only 2 out of 12 people seemed to find the piece helpful. I can't imagine why but were I in need of consoling I can always remind myself of Nietzsche's line, "Where the rabble drinks, all wells are poisoned."
I'll take advantage of this precious opportunity to draw your attention to my other accepted review here, this time of Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment. Though it would admittedly be difficult to top my Camus review, I am proud of the lines,
"There is no denying that this is quite a big book so if you're not prepared to read this for quite a while, I'd go elsewhere if I were you. Me, I've no problem with big books and if it's very good, the bigger the better. And this book is very, very good. Which makes it ok that it's so big."
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7 comments:
indeed, the masses congregate at Amazon and express their disapproval of us beyond-bloggers by clicking 'no'. But they are a thing that will be surpassed and in the end all us beyond-bloggers will fight until one only is left alive, covered in gore & filth.
Because there can be only one. However, the winner will eventually get quite bored with being the last living being, and will commit suicide.
So in the end there will be no one. It's quite sad.
That is both extremely exhilirating and profoundly depressing, Elberry. Which of course means that it is deeply moving.
Read it and wept. 2 out of 12? How absurd. If I hadn't read it already a couple of times, I wouldn't have to after reading your review. But seriously, it is a great book and Camus, to me, the most articulate and authentic voice of existentialism.
my fave Camus is The Fall. i managed to read the original La Chute over a summer, as it's so simply written.
After that, Sisyphus...i love that Camus (in contrast to a lot of philosophers) seems to mean absolutely everything he writes.
I'd have to admit to not being particularly affected by The Outsider, Neil, but was farmore impressed with The Plague, which seemed a much deeper and more mature work. Camus seems a figure much worthier of serious attention than Sartre for whom I admit to having less than no regard; Camus being a human first as opposed to a kind of ideology spouting mouthpiece.
Haven't read The Fall, Elberry, though I think I do have it around somewhere. And I'd agree about Camus' genuineness- a person I could conceivably have seen dipping his toes in the kind of waters someone like Huxley did, due to his seeming to be of an open-ended intelligence instead of someone of fixed intellectual positions.
i acknowledge Sartre's intelligence but loathe everything i've read of his. His novels leave me with a nausea for flesh.
Camus for all his bleak viewpoint, had an old-school heroism, and an ardent love of sex, sunshine, simple happiness.
The Fall can be read as a critique of how hypocritical Sartre-esque fashionable left-wingers are. The protagonist is a phoney who convinced even himself of his left-wing credentials; then one day he fell, and becomes this strange embittered figure.
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