Thoughts on reading in another language: L'etranger

I have just (re)read Albert Camus’s 1942 novel, “L’etranger” (aka The Stranger, The Outsider), and I use the French title because I read it in French. I have not posted on this novel while reading it; only now, at completion – and that’s because reading it in French, a language I can speak a little but couldn’t possibly write and can read only the simplest of texts, is an entirely different experience (for me) than reading it in English would have been. (I’d supposedly read it in French in college, but I know I must have bent the rules and read it in English). In any event, struggling to read it in Fr., with a dictionary at my side, lead me to focus much more on the language than on the novel. But there’s a reason this novel was so often prescribed for mid-level Fr. Courses: the plot (spoiler alert) is minimal (a young Algerian-French man, Mersault, feeling remote and detached from other people, an “existential” anti-hero, for no apparent reason shoots and kills an Arab on the beach and is quickly arrested, imprisoned, tried, and sentenced to death by guillotine), the language (first-person narration) is straightforward, w/ only a few passages of descriptive prose. I found in reading it that at times it was better to not look at all at the dictionary – as I could make sense of most of the passages just skipping over the words that were unfamiliar to me (often, you can figure out the meaning, though I’m sure that had I written out the sentences in English there would have been many howlers); at times, though, I was checking the dictionary at almost every sentence, which made the reading tough going: I’d get the meaning, but miss the story, so to speak. Still, even for those like me w/ rudimentary French, the attempt to read the novel in its language of composition entails “close reading,” intense reading, sentence by sentence, at times word by word: I hadn’t paid such close attention to any prose text I’d read in years, maybe ever. But that’s not to say I “got” everything out of this novel. What I really read was no L’etranger but le francais.