As a college freshman, a computer glitch enrolled me in Existentialism, totally unbeknownst to me. Having no clue I’d been enrolled in the class (which I had not registered for), of course I never attended the class and was shocked when I got an F among all my A’s. Even though the professor and the registrar took my side, the dean forced me to take the class anyway to get rid of the F, despite it being a senior level class for philosophy majors (and I was not a philosophy major and only a freshman). Sarte’s Being and Nothingness nearly put me comatose (but was so fat and heavy it made a great door stop). The acid-dropping professor who jumped from desk to chair like a monkey was entertaining, though. The Tin Drum movie was creepy. Camus was okay (we had to read La Nausée — not his best). Dostoyevsky was great, Kafka good.
But it was the Kierkegaard that nearly did me in. I had German class right after Existentialism, so my German prof decided to make me read Kierkegaard in German and translate it into English. His sentences were so long I had to turn pages to find the verb at the end (which made me decide German was a very stupid language for the literate and ought too be outlawed written form). Why it had to be a German edition of Kierkegaard, who wrote in Danish, rather than translating from Kant or Wittgenstein or Grass or Kafka, all of whom we had to read and who wrote in German, I don’t know — maybe because of those impossibly long sentences.
So Existentialism mostly left a bad taste in my mouth at the tender age of seventeen, as you can imagine. Thanks for recommending La vie devant soi and L’Étranger. Maybe I should give Campus another try, and check out Gary (whom I’ve never read).
Your bittersweet experience with Existentialism soounds like something Kafka would have written.
The Dean would probably have said: “See? Now you have lived the genre for yourself. That was our planned goal all along. No need to thank me!”
IIRC we read ‘Nausea’ and ‘The Plague’ in high school senior English. What I discovered by reading them was that I had a visceral hatred for Existentialism in all of its forms. But then I hated almost every assigment in that English class. I’d already been booted out of “honors English” for having a bad attitude and refusing to do assigments. I gave them a figurative middle finger in return by getting a near perfect score on the SAT verbal. School and I did not get along.