A man receives a telegram informing him that his mother has died—maybe today, maybe the day before. Whichever is no matter to him. The telegram requests that he travel to a nursing home 50 miles away to attend her burial. Irritated, spiteful—he had abandoned his mother there three years earlier and couldn’t be bothered to visit—he takes a bumpy three-hour bus trip along the Algerian coast for the funeral. He refuses to allow an open coffin, defying the wishes of her caretakers.

He rushes home as soon as the grave is closed to spend time with his girlfriend. He tells her that he doesn’t love her but he’ll marry her anyway, maybe, as long as she has no expectations of him.

These are two key episodes in Albert Camus’ debut novel, The Stranger. Meursault, a young French Algerian, lives without passion or sensation. He is a clerk of some sort, one who makes Bartleby the Scrivener seem a model employee. He is curious enough about his apathy to kill another young man, an Arab, as a kind of thought experiment: Is it possible to kill a stranger without anger, just to see how it feels?

Meursault is arrested for the crime. During the novel’s long courtroom sequence, which nods to both Kafka and Dostoyevsky, he hardly lifts a finger in his own defense. He tells the jurors that instead of regret, he is annoyed by the inconvenience of having to stand before them. He is condemned to die, not for killing a colonized Arab in colonial Algeria but to honor Camus’ thesis, put forth in a 1955 preface: “In our society, any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” The charge is repeated nearly verbatim by the prosecutor.

The Stranger was first published in an underground edition in 1942, during the Nazi occupation of France, a time of widespread killing without emotion or remorse. It excited controversy from the start; Jean-Paul Sartre admired the novel but called it “unjustified and unjustifiable,” though it perfectly exemplified the anomie of existentialism. For many French readers, then and now, Meursault symbolized their country’s cynical accommodation to Fascism and, later, the ugly Algerian civil war of 1954-1961, during which some half a million Arabs were killed by an army of Meursaults.

Right-wing French politicians scourged Camus as a traitor, priests as an atheist. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean communist poet, denounced him. When Camus died in an auto accident in January 1960, two years after being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, it was rumored that it was no accident at all: Some blamed the KGB, some the CIA.

“I had tried to draw in my character the only Christ we deserve,” Camus reflected in that preface. Perhaps it is true that we deserve no better than the scornful Meursault today. Eighty years on, Camus’ pessimistic, unforgettable novel endures as a portrait of the apathetic evil that surrounds us and, much as we may try to ignore it, governs our lives.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.