The Stranger
SPOILERS. You've been warned.
I finished the Stranger on Monday. It's written in a pretty matter of fact style until the killing happens and then it goes into a more passionate style. It's a bit of unreliable narrator but also nailing understatement. The narrator feels more often than he lets on, which is used to great effect in the beginning of the book when he's watching his so called friend basically entrap and beat up and ex-girlfriend for some imagined crime.
There's a trial and every action that we've seen through the narrator's eyes is warped and twisted by the public and everyone outside him. That maybe, he just doesn't have the words or doesn't feel that badly about his mother's death at the beginning of the novel, as the two people didn't speak for the last 10 years of the mother's life. By the end, the narrator is screaming at a priest about God just before he dies and refuses to accept any kind of last rites or acknowledge divinity on the ledge before his own death.
It's also under 150 pages, which, at least the edition I have, makes it an infuriating size. It's tantalizingly close, almost at the point where it can be stuck in a back pocket, but it's just a little too big to transport that way. He's simply a depressing author to read at the moment. Maybe it's a product of where physical I am. Or, it could be where I am mentally.
Where I am mentally is acclimating to the new place. Classes will help that, give the weeks some definition, but without a working alarm clock, I'm in a kind of "I get up when I get up" schedule, which, considering I have to wake up today to see the Coliseum neither earlier nor later than I'm used to, but instead right in that middle that I haven't hit yet, my life feels like a crapshoot. I walked last night listening to the Chrono Cross soundtrack, in an attempt to do something with my insomnia, and while it was interesting going back and reliving those memories, it made me wonder, ought I to be listening to music I already have a powerful attachment to and visual of when I'm in Rome, or should I be doing everything new, straight?
It's something to chew on. The crapshoot, somehow, remains fun thus far.
Since I didn't put a song when I posted this originally and that was an oversight, I'll fix it post-facto. The corretto (Italian for generic alcohol put in coffee to "correct' it) for this post, is a silly AMV for Reel Big Fish's Hungry Like the Wolf cover to Lupin the III, which is not just a great pairing, but a great way to offset the dead serious Camus. So! Lupin the III and Camus. A match made in, well, here. Enjoy.
SPOILERS. You've been warned.
I finished the Stranger on Monday. It's written in a pretty matter of fact style until the killing happens and then it goes into a more passionate style. It's a bit of unreliable narrator but also nailing understatement. The narrator feels more often than he lets on, which is used to great effect in the beginning of the book when he's watching his so called friend basically entrap and beat up and ex-girlfriend for some imagined crime.
There's a trial and every action that we've seen through the narrator's eyes is warped and twisted by the public and everyone outside him. That maybe, he just doesn't have the words or doesn't feel that badly about his mother's death at the beginning of the novel, as the two people didn't speak for the last 10 years of the mother's life. By the end, the narrator is screaming at a priest about God just before he dies and refuses to accept any kind of last rites or acknowledge divinity on the ledge before his own death.
It's also under 150 pages, which, at least the edition I have, makes it an infuriating size. It's tantalizingly close, almost at the point where it can be stuck in a back pocket, but it's just a little too big to transport that way. He's simply a depressing author to read at the moment. Maybe it's a product of where physical I am. Or, it could be where I am mentally.
Where I am mentally is acclimating to the new place. Classes will help that, give the weeks some definition, but without a working alarm clock, I'm in a kind of "I get up when I get up" schedule, which, considering I have to wake up today to see the Coliseum neither earlier nor later than I'm used to, but instead right in that middle that I haven't hit yet, my life feels like a crapshoot. I walked last night listening to the Chrono Cross soundtrack, in an attempt to do something with my insomnia, and while it was interesting going back and reliving those memories, it made me wonder, ought I to be listening to music I already have a powerful attachment to and visual of when I'm in Rome, or should I be doing everything new, straight?
It's something to chew on. The crapshoot, somehow, remains fun thus far.
Since I didn't put a song when I posted this originally and that was an oversight, I'll fix it post-facto. The corretto (Italian for generic alcohol put in coffee to "correct' it) for this post, is a silly AMV for Reel Big Fish's Hungry Like the Wolf cover to Lupin the III, which is not just a great pairing, but a great way to offset the dead serious Camus. So! Lupin the III and Camus. A match made in, well, here. Enjoy.
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