The Stranger by Albert Camus

While I did read Albert Camus's The Stranger in high school, I can't say I remember much of anything about it. I was on exchange in Canada and the book was part of my French course, so there was the added difficulty of actually understanding individual words and sentences in the original French. And The Stranger is in no way an easy book, even for adults. It's true that the English translation that I opted for this time wasn't too difficult for choice of words, but it did confound me more than once with its setting and story. However, with my slightly more elevated age (mostly compared to last time), I realized that part of The Stranger's appeal is the way that it makes the reader ask questions about what is actually going on.

Meursault is a Frenchman living in Algiers. His mother has recently passed away but his life is mostly ordinary. A series of events unfolds, and as he is mostly dispassionate to them, his life floats along at the mercy of his neighbor and a lover. It is this dispassion (or coldness or detachment) that is, in fact, the center piece of the novel. Meursault is punished for his unwillingness to take a moral stance or show feelings, even if those feelings were only a ruse to conform to expectations. This unwillingness to conform finally drives him to reject society completely.

The story rolls along inevitably, but the character depiction is nothing if not intriguing. I remember the original French being brilliant and beautiful, and the translation is mostly excellent, from what I can tell. The Stranger isn't something that you should read in high school, though. Young readers might mistake the stylistic choices for blandness or boredom. They may think that Meursault's inability to show emotion is a fault of the writer and not a key thematic point. And, most crucially, they most definitely won't understand the way that the adult world is littered with unrealistic expectations for all of its dreary inhabitants.

Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar

From what I gather, Barbarians at the Gate is something of a business non-fiction classic, though it wasn't immediately obvious to me why. I bought the Kindle version so I had no idea that it's actually almost five hundred pages long - way longer than most books in the genre. Apparently, it's something of a precursor to Too Big to Fail, which I loved, so I decided to let go of my initial suspicions and gave it a try.

Barbarians at the Gate is slow off the starting line. The background and stories of all involved are given first, and for those not familiar with what actually happened, this can be a chore. The back stories are interesting (and relevant) so you shouldn't skip them either. Luckily, the material is well written and there never seems to be anything completely superfluous in the text. Some of the wording is a bit heavy-handed for my taste, but it doesn't disrupt the experience. It just sounds a bit more 80's.

What I love about Barbarians at the Gate is that there is no preaching tone, no attempts at forcing a point of view. Generally, there is no other agenda than to tell an involving story without leaving out any important details. Readers are allowed to make their own decisions; whether to hate or simply dislike Ross Johnson, a main character. The story is about a corporate takeover, but there are so many other elements that it's difficult to keep score. There is the greed of Wall Street, the punishing competitiveness of the modern white man. The foolhardiness of past corporate America, coming to grips with a new decade.

Barbarians is the type of book, I guess, that gets read in business classrooms across the world. And in a way, I imagine that I would find it tiresome, if it were an assignment. The heft is discouraging, and the dozens of characters are hard to keep track of. But at the end of the day, most classroom staples (Catch-22, Moby Dick and so on) are classics for a reason. It might not be obvious immediately, but their fame is almost always well deserved.