Pushing the limits of absurdity

I've started reading Albert Camus's The Plague (La Peste in French). It's far less impressive than what I expected. Maybe that's because I compare it with Stranger, my all-time favorite. Stranger was the first serious book I read in my teenage years. I was fascinated by the objectivity and impassiveness of the very first line, "Mother died today or was it yesterday" and the rest of the book never diminished my infatuation. It was the first time I confronted a book dealing in such an explicit manner with absurdity of life and death. Actually, the reason I decided to learn French was to read Stranger in its own language (I had read it in Farsi), something I've never done yet and ended up with reading French lyrics (which I enjoy and feel indebted to Camus!). Even now, I'm shamelessly reading The Plague in English.