My first thought, while reading the short, simple, almost choppy, sentences of the earlier chapters, was that it must be a translation issue (it was originally written in French), and that surely a novelist as highly regarded as Albert Camus would write sophisticated, eloquent prose. However, by the time the narrator is imprisoned, awaiting execution, the language becomes philosophical and the sentences longer and more diverse in structure. My conclusion is that it was written this way to achieve a particular effect, to show a man who neither thinks nor feels deeply – he is unaffected by his mother’s death, and agrees to marry Marie if she wants, but admits he doesn’t think he loves her, but also doesn’t believe that matters.

He murders a man as if in a dream, blames the sun (as much as anything else) for his actions. He is either not capable of lying, or not willing to lie, and he is unable to show remorse at his trial or during the investigation, convincing the court that he is soulless. Camus explains in the afterword that it is, at least in part, “the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth.”

But when he has no future to distract him from the present, he is transformed, and the eloquence of the prose reflects this.

“[E]verybody knows that life isn’t worth living. And when it came down to it, I wasn’t unaware of the fact that it doesn’t matter very much whether you die at thirty or at seventy since, in either case, other men and women will naturally go on living, for thousands of years even. Nothing was plainer, in fact. It was still only me who was dying, whether it was now or in twenty years’ time.”

I love that this is such an unusual tale with an anti-hero at its center, but one who I can relate to very easily and suffer and discover truths alongside. A simple yet complex being who doesn’t express deep emotions but feels more comfortable with logic as his guide.

By and large, I think it's fairest to say "I didn't mind" the books we read in school. 

A few stood out as instant favorites: Shakespeare's Macbeth which, together with Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet movie (which we watched in class) laid the groundwork for my lifelong love of Shakespeare; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (which the rest of my class hated, but I instantly loved).

Some that I found OK without being enthusiastic about them still inspired me to take a closer look at their authors and discover works that I ended up liking much better -- e.g. Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers and Intrigue and Love (aka Passion and Politics), which eventually led me to his Don Carlos, which in turn became an instant favorite.

Some I rather disliked in school (at least in part, because of the way in which they were presented in class), but I reread them years later and they suddenly made a whole lot more sense -- such as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Albert Camus's The Stranger (though I still liked The Plague, which we never read in school, better), Max Frisch's Homo Faber and The Firebugs; and, perhaps most surprisingly, Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician (surprising because Mann was already a favorite author of mine at the time, so this should have been a no-brainer favorite from the start).

There were only a few books that I positively hated in school, but those I hated with enough of a vengeance never to have looked at them again -- or at anything else written by their authors: Peter Handke's Kaspar and Alfred Andersch's Sansibar.

Far and away the biggest impact on my reading preferences, though, was wielded by my final English teacher, who not only taught that Shakespeare class mentioned above and introduced me to sonnets (EBB, Shakespeare and otherwise), but who also gave me a copy of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park as a gift ... and thus inspired yet another one of my most lasting instances of book fandom -- because come on, if you fall in love with Austen's writing when reading Mansfield Park, everything else is just bound to fall into place completely naturally.

(Task: Did you love or hate the books you had to read for school?  Looking back, which ones (good or bad) stand out to you the most?)

‘I don’t think I’m a coward, most of the time at least. I have had the opportunity to test it. Only, there are some ideas that I cannot bear.’

The doctor looked directly at him.

‘You’ll see her again,’ he said.

‘Perhaps, but I cannot bear the idea of this going on and of her getting older all that time. At thirty, you are starting to get old and you have to take advantage of everything. I don’t know if you can understand that.’ 

Eh???

Btw, I'm not too fond of the English version of this. I seem to remember that my old German translation had a much better flow and was less ambiguous, too.