M’ma is the Algerian mother of Haroun, the narrator of Daoud’s novel, who can never break free of his duty to console a mother who is in perpetual mourning for her beloved son Moussa, killed on a beach in Algiers in 1942 by a guy named Meursault, the narrator of The Stranger. Kaplan includes a section in which she addresses Kamel Daoud’s 2015 novel The Meursault Investigation, which, she notes, sets its own tone with a riff on that immortal first sentence: “Today, M’ma is still alive.” (“Three years to create a book,” Camus wrote at the time. She details Camus’ writing process, using his diaries and letters, and analyzes the shifts in interpreting the novel over the decades after its publication in 1942.

Kaplan begins her story in 1939, when Camus was a 25-year-old journalist living in his native Algeria, already shaped by childhood poverty and tuberculosis, and on his way to developing a finely tuned sense of the absurd. Over the years, she notes, critics have interpreted The Stranger as “a colonial allegory, an existential prayer book, an indictment of conventional morality, a study in alienation, or a ‘Hemingway rewrite of Kafka.’”

“ Reading The Stranger is a rite of passage,” writes Kaplan in the prologue to her remarkable cultural history of Albert Camus’s iconic novel. Today, NBCC board member Jane Ciabattari offers an appreciation of criticism finalist Alice Kaplan’s Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (University of Chicago Press). In the 30 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 16 announcement of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty finalists.

Books like the stranger by albert camus