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By Sean Coughlan BBC News Magazine The Outsider published in 1942 Describes a young man in Algeria on trial for murder Challenge to conventional morality delivered in a short, sharp, dispassionate style Mean, moody and alone. What is the appeal of the outsider? The laureate of the cool teenager, Albert Camus, is having all his novels republished this week. It's the perfect checklist for an artist to appeal to a brooding young man. Died young, looked good in moody, atmospheric photographs, wrote about serious stuff in a way that was seriously cool. And most of all, he was an outsider, a rebel with his collars turned up, not part of the crowd. Albert Camus, French writer and one of the youngest people to have won a Nobel prize for literature, is making a comeback. Penguin are releasing all his novels again this week - and his most-famous w**k, The Outsider, was recently voted as the most significant "watershed" book for men. Rebel, rebel It's the book, preferably in dog-eared paperback, that generations of soulful young men have tucked inside their coat pocket, where it can be seen, even if never read. It's the original rebel novel about the confusion and alienation of a young man in a dishonest and random world. Written in the 1940s, it was the predecessor of a whole line-up of rebels and outsiders. Even though Camus was a left-bank existentialist, living in circles which survived entirely on cigarettes and black and white photography, by the time the cult of the outsider reached Hollywood it was big box office. Movie stars such as James Dean and Marlon Brando portrayed loners at the edge of society, not even sure what they were protesting about. "What are you rebelling against?" Brando's character gets asked in the Wild One. "What'd ya got?" he retorts. It was alienation, but with fashion and chiselled profiles. And you can trace the lineage through pop music, with the self-absorbed boys' music of the likes of Morrissey, Joy Division and Kurt Cobain. Or in sport, it's the difference between being Eric Cantona or Bryan Robson. Fatal attraction But why should we want to be someone who is unwanted? Social psychologist Arthur Cassidy says it is part of the process of adolescence to want to play with identity - to try out how someone else might feel. The outsider, someone with an unusual or unfamiliar attitude, can be particularly attractive. It's why middle-class kids in leafy suburbs want to buy rap music about living in gun-toting ghettoes in the United States. "Young people become bored with their own culture, it loses meaning for them - and they learn that it's not a bad thing to be an outsider, opposites can attract", says Dr Cassidy. Through images of rebels and outsiders they can have their own experimental identities, he says. In literary terms, Camus's posthumous success reflects his ability to still feel modern, says Robin Buss, who has translated the new versions appearing this week. First lonely teen A book such as The Outsider "struck an entirely new note, it was something very original, it was the first real model for the lonely teenager," he says. And it has managed to retain its sense of immediacy. And there is something resolutely cool about the storytelling - dispassionate and to the point - which appeals to a male sense of style. This sense of style extended beyond books. Camus was also a goalkeeper, playing in Algeria, where he had been born. And, as part of the fashion for replica football strips, there is a range of Football Philosophy shirts - with Camus the number one. Mark Perryman, who runs the firm, says they have sold about 5,000 Camus football shirts, carrying the quote: "All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football." Moody and murderous There's no escaping that Camus has a particular appeal for male readers. And a survey of most significant books, produced by academic and cultural commentator Lisa Jardine, found that The Outsider was the runaway winner for men. ALBERT CAMUS Born 1913 in Algeria, his father died in World War 1 Edited underground French Resistance newspaper Major works: The Outsider, The Plague, The Fall, The Rebel 1957 awarded Nobel Prize for Literature 1960 died in a car crash near Sens, north-eastern France "What Camus stands for is unsentimental outsiderness - that's what Morrissey was and probably what gets people going about Pete Doherty," she says. And its account of a "moody, slouchy, isolated, slightly murderously-inclined bloke" taps into something in the male world-view, she says, and into the "moody, alienated young men" in each generation. Also, and very importantly, it's incredibly short at little more than 100 pages. While women opt for lengthy Victorian novels as their "watershed" novels, men want books that are sharp and to the point. And just the thing to leave out if you want to impress someone. Story from BBC NEWS: |