The Meursault Investigation

An imaginative concept carried out with beautiful writing. Taking the story of "The Stranger" by Camus told from the point of view of the unnamed arab boy who was murdered by the protagonist in the original story, filling him out with a history and coloring in the background that was omitted. The story told from the other side. Brief, compelling and angry.

Reading this was a chore. I read The Stranger and this novel back to back and I have to say- this was just the worst! Tedious, repetitive, not enlightening. I loved the premise but in the end we didn't really learn anything about The Arab. Pedantic and wordy. can't get my head around all the glorious reviews. Wanted to like it. Sorry.

Excellent book and a good follow up to Camus's book It also brings up powerful the prejudice involved in handling a crime which is there in countries who had colonies. It is not unlike what happens in this country with the impact on black people

This book consists of a boring, repetitive rant by the narrator. The philosophy expressed is very negative. The insights expressed about authority are not original. I was not able to make myself read the last section of the book.

Actually it is an unusual book to for obtaing a sense of the destabilizing ofaFrench Colonized country , ( Algeria) and the after math of post -Colonial existence or so called independence. The symbolic assination of the man on the beach an existential Sartre technique of providing a perspective of the people left in the country to recover a national identity after it had been lost b.y repression and perhaps the obliteration of not only a nation's soul and its effigacy , the remaining spokespersons of mother , a surviving brother of the man assinated on the beach is a picture of a country's history that can never be pieced together because of the obliterating sense of loss of who we are and were once as Algerians cannot be reconstructed because loss and reality cannot be reassembled.

To only see this book as a response to THE STRANGER is to short change this novel. Daoud is, of course, making an argument that the nameless Arab killed in THE STRANGER was a real person. His narrator tells us the story of his brother who was the victim of happenstance when he encountered Meursault on that beach. But that discussion only takes up a portion of this book, which is why it deserves to be read in its own right. You could read this book without ever reading THE STRANGER as long as you understood that the victim could be any victim of random violence. Isn't this what anyone who had lost a family member to such a crime would want? To give the victim a name, a character, a presence?

One could imagine what Daoud has done without reading the book if this is all that there was to it. But Daoud takes us on his own journey through the existentialist dilemma. No longer is a man caught between the absurd and the desire for meaning. In modern Algeria, a man is caught between the forces of theocracy and the desire for meaning. Rather than an exploration of how one defines oneself against a pitiless nothingness, Daoud is asking how a person defines him/herself against a pitiless system full of meaning, in which the meaning brooks no questioning of its authority, no questioning of the tenets it sets forth of how one should live. And in that respect, ALL fundamentalist religions act in this way toward those they seek to control. So, if speaking out against the theocrats brings with it the danger of death, what are the circumstances that require a human being to take that risk?

This book deserves to be read on its own merits, free of the obvious comparison to the text that it nominally challenges. Its questions about life in an age where God has once again assumed center stage, and where God's interpreters have established themselves as those whose opinions are the only ones that count, are as important today as the questions that Camus raised in his era.

I started this book with great expectations: after all, it is The Stranger from the perspective of the victim. I thought it might complement The Stranger the way Brahms' Variations on a theme by Haydn complements the latter. And yet I came away disappointed. Why? Because the character development, which was unidimensional in Camus' exposition of the antihero remains just as unidimensional while the perspective of the antihero so well developed in The Stranger is not well-matched by the perspective of the protagonist in this book. All we learn is that he kills a Frenchman because - to simplify - his mother made him do it. Sure I understand the victim from the Camus book now has a name and a family and a point of view of that family is presented. But it is simply The Stranger turned on its head: done cleverly, well-written, but not fulfilling. The final test I gave it was to ask: could Camus, had he been an Arab, have written The Meursault Investigation. My answer was yes. So then I asked could Daoud having been a pied-noir have written The Stranger. And my answer was I doubt it.

It is an intense book - one that I plan to read again and again. The evocative prose is as different from the restraint of the Stranger as can be. Yet, there are some similarities. I can't quite identify them as yet, but that is why I have to read the book again.

The novel's first two chapters are somewhat abstruse and strike this reader as esoteric, especially if the reader is unfamiliar with the novel written by Campus. Admittedly, there is the rest of the novel to read and absorb, so things should become clearer when the reading resumes.

Camus's "The Stranger" putatively retold by the murdered Arab's brother. The narrator is a bitter, drunken old man, reliable narrator or no/ It's up tot he reader to decide. The device has been used before countless times often to better effect but what separates this from the others, is subject of the tale. Fans of "The Stranger" will want to read this

Albert Camus's "The Stranger" (in the Matthew Ward translation) begins: "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe. I don't know."

Kamel Daoud's "The Meursault Investigation" (in John Cullen's translation) begins: "Mama's still alive today. She doesn't say anything now, but there are many tales she could tell. Unlike me: I've rehashed this story in my head so often, I almost can't remember it anymore."

Daoud is an Algerian journalist based in Oran, where he writes for Algeria's third-largest French-language newspaper. His novel is a tour-de-force, has won a number of prizes, is being translated around the world, and will be the basis of a 2017 film.

Meursault is the name of Camus's narrator, a pied noir who seems to be without ambition, motivation, or inner life. When his boss in Algiers offers a bigger job, an opportunity to live in Paris and travel, he turns him down. "I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn't dissatisfied with mine her at all." That evening when Marie, the woman with whom he's been having sex, asks if he wants to marry her, "I said it didn't make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to." In the middle of the book, almost carelessly, Meursault shoots an anonymous Arab on the beach, then fires four more bullets into his body. The Arab is a stranger, and Meursault feels no more remorse for the killing than love for Marie or enthusiasm for his job.

Daoud's brilliant idea was to tell the story of the murder from the point of view of the dead Arab's brother, who was a child at the time. He's now an old man, sitting in an Oran bar, talking to an unidentified and silent interlocutor, hashing and rehashing the murder. He gives the victim a name, Musa, and talks about the effect on himself and his mother, his anger at the unnamed author who wrote a book about Meursault, colonialism, his involvement (or not) in the Algerian revolution, his own murder of a pied noir, his failed relationship with a woman. I believe a case could be made that Daoud's narrator is a mirror image of Meursault. Except that this narrator is more engaged:

"I squeezed the trigger and fired twice. Two bullets. On in the belly, and the other in the necs. That makes seven all told, I thought at once, absurdly. (But the first five, the ones that killed Musa, had been fired twenty years earlier . . .)"

He, like Meursault, has interesting observations about life: "To tell the truth, love is a heavenly beast that scares the hell out of me. I watch it devour people, two by two; it fascinates them with the lure of eternity, shuts them up in a sort of cocoon, lifts them up to heaven, and then drops their carcasses back to earth like peels. Have you seen what becomes of people when they split up? They're scratches on a closed door."

One does not have to have read "The Stranger" to be fascinated and engaged by Daoud's narrator but reading it, then "The Meursault Investigation" can make the experiences seriously richer. I was skeptical about an unknown writer taking off on the Nobel Prize-winning Camus, but Kamel Daoud's novel, while offering its own rewards, can stand with Camus's.

I did NOT enjoy this book. It read like somebody having a long winded rant.
I expected to be given an understanding of why Meursault killed.
In this book the author say’s there was no body, which is not possible, otherwise Meursault could not have been charged.
It was a book full of holes

(Note: This review was written by the person who received this book as a gift. The gift was purchased through the store.) How many of us bother to try to see both sides of a conflict and the consequences to all parties' concerns rather than just our own involvement in a situation? In the novel, The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud reimagines Camus' book, The Stranger, from the Algerian character's perspective, which opens the reader to the world of those who know and are related to the victim. To read the Meursault Investigation is to accept an invitation to step outside of one's "tribe", to cleanse one's own "door of perception" so as to be able to see the full picture rather than only a fraction of it. This "seeing" can bring us closer to what Blake called the "infinite". As William Blake reflected, "Humanity can no longer afford to close himself up until he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern." I highly recommend this novel--it's well written, intelligent, and thought provoking.

Kamel Daoud's novel was originally published in French under the tile Meurault, contre-enquête in 2013 in Algeria. John Cullen's English translation is entitled The Meursault Investigation, and it was published in 2015. There is also an Arabic translation under the title معارضة الغريب.

By no means should this blog entry be considered a genuine review. Nevertheless, I hope some of my thoughts after reading Albert Camus's L'etranger (English title The Stranger), excerpts of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism and Kamel Daoud's recent novel will be useful.

This does contain a few spoilers.

1. I don't think it's useful to read The Meursault Investigation without having first read The Stranger. Kamel Daoud denies that his novel is a response to Albert Camus, and I actually buy that. It's just that there's too much meta going on in Kamel Daoud's novel which a reader who hadn't read The Stranger would miss.

Kamel Daoud, in my mind and in the interview linked to above, extends Albert Camus's novel to more recent times and to other characters. His book isn't a hagiography of the Algerian victim. In fact, Harun, Kamel's protagonist really doesn't know much about his brother, Camus's murder victim, and, after decades, he can't distinguish between his mother's spells, hallucinations and desires on the one hand and the results of his "investigation" on the other, especially in the midst the fog of his stunted life and the stunted life of Algeria post-independence.

2. Just as Albert Camus's protagonist is a stranger to his (French colonialist / metropole) society, so is Kamel Daoud's protagonist. In the case of Kamel Daoud's protagonist, a large target of his wrath is religion, specifically Islam. Kamel Daoud cleverly inverts many Muslim texts in the novel. Here's a non-comprehensive list:

Kamel Daoud names the unnamed 1942 Arab victim in The Stranger Musa. Kamel Daoud's protagonist is Musa's younger brother Harun. Harun and his younger brother Musa are both names of messengers mentioned in the Quran.
The 1963 murder victim is Joseph, which corresponds to Yusuf in Arabic, another messenger mentioned in the Quran.
Joseph's bloody shirt restores sight to Musa and Harun's mother. In the Quran, Yusuf's shirt restores sight to his father Ya3qub.
Harun describes about his disposal of Joseph's body as throwing it into a well. In the Quran, Yusuf's brothers treacherously throw him into a well, where a passing caravan rescues him and sells him into slavery.
"No one has ever met [God], not even Musa ..." In the Quran, God speaks directly to the Messenger Musa, and this is considered a distinction for him.
Just as an FYI, if you don't want to read anti-religion in your fiction, don't read this book. In fact, some in Algeria are trying to silence Kamel Daoud right now through takfir (excommunication) and capital punishment. In addition, many didn't like an article he wrote after the mass sexual assault and harassment incidents in Cologne, Germany.

3. In style, The Meursault Investigation differs considerably from The Stranger. The former is almost entirely the inner life of Harun in the form of a monologue from Harun to the reader in a bar in Oran. The monologue is emotional, contradictory and non-linear. Part one of the The Stranger, while told from the protagonist's perspective, is written in brief, simple sentences in a linear narrative. Thus the protagonist's inner life comes off as flat and shallow. In part two, the protagonist shares more of his thoughts and shows more emotion, but never to the extent that Harun does.

4. You might want to also read Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment to help you think about Camus and Kamel Daoud. Raskalnikov, Dostoevsky's murderer, dabbles with modernity enough to fool himself into the crime, but his subsequent collapse reveal him to have failed to escape from pre-modern social norms. This escape from social norms and the absence of resolution and redemption are considered by some to be features of the modern novel.

5. The following, in my opinion, is a key passage in the novel, but I hope somebody in the comments may enlighten me because I'm actually not certain where to put it. It occurs after Harun murders Joseph and buries the body.
And after that? Nothing happened. And whereas the night -- its trees plunged into the stars for hours, its moon, the last pallid trace of the vanished sun, the door of our little house, which forbade time to enter it, and the blind darkness, our only witness -- whereas the night was gently beginning to withdraw its confusion and give things back their angles, my body was able to recognize the arrival of the denouement at last. It made me shiver with an almost animal delight. Lying on my back in the courtyard, I made an even denser night for myself by closing my eyes. When I opened them, I remember seeing yet more stars in the sky, and I knew I was trapped in a bigger dream, a more gigantic denial, that of another being who always kept his eyes closed and didn't want to see anything, like me. (pp. 85-6)
Who is this other being? Why is Harun trapped in its dream and its denial?

6. Kamel Daoud says Albert Camus is an Algerian, even if he denies it. Edward Said, on the other hand, writes that "Camus's novels and stories thus very precisely distill the traditions, idioms, and discursive strategies of France's appropriation of Algeria. ... The colon embodies both the real human effort his community contributed and the obstacle of refusing to give up a systematically unjust political system. ... We have done what we have done here, and so let us do it again." (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 184-5)

And, just so you know, Edward Said's understanding of "France's appropriation of Algeria" is not pleasant:

The core of French military policy as [Theodore] Bugeaud and his officers articulated it was the razzia, or punitive raid on Algerians' villages, their homes, harvests, women and children. "The Arabs," said, Bugeaud, "must be prevented from sowing, from harvesting, and from pasturing their flocks." [Mostafa] Lacheraf gives a sampling of the poetic exhilaration recorded time after time by the French officers at their work, their sense that here at last was an opportunity for guerre à outrance beyond all morality or need. General [Nicolas] Changarneir, for instance, describes a pleasant distraction vouchsafed his troops in raiding peaceful villages; this type of activity is taught by the scriptures, he says, in which Joshua and other great leaders conducted "de bien terribles razzias," and were blessed by God. Ruin, total destruction, uncompromising brutality are condoned not only because legitimized by God but because, in words echoed and re-echoed from Bugeaud to Salan, "les Arabes ne comprennent que la force brutale." (Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 182)

Like Chinua Achebe criticized Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I also (j'accuse!) criticize Albert Camus.

Kamel Daoud uses techniques such as inversion, satire and denial to press forward with Camus's philosophical themes while asserting the Algerianness of the setting and the characters.

In my opinion, both Edward Said's and Kamel Daoud's perspectives are helpful.

This work won the 2015 Prix Goncourt for best debut novel and is a series of monologues in one of Oran’s last drinking bars, soon to be shut forever, as elsewhere. Who does the talking? A seventy-year old man called Haroun, who was only seven when in 1942 his older brother Musa (20) was killed senselessly with five gunshots by a Frenchman, under the blistering summer Sun at 14:00 hours, the hour of the devil, on a deserted Algiers beach. Their mother will never be the same again, always carrying two newspaper clippings with her about the killing of an Arab identified with two initials only. A Frenchman called Meursault is arrested and tried, but much remains a mystery, or as Haroun shrugs, ‘How can anyone on a single day lose his name, his life and his mortal remains?’ , assuming the body was dropped into the sea, taken away by the current.
Who is his listener? A young Frenchman, a PhD candidate, carrying Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” in his briefcase. He has tracked Haroun down, for obvious reasons, because that novel described said murder and aftermath from the perspective of the murderer. He is in luck, because Haroun is thoroughly familiar with that book himself and a fantastic storyteller. Fourteen meetings, plenty of wine, fourteen chapters, then a final fifteenth.
It lays bare the entire gamut of human emotions. Haroun is a complex, a-religious character fearing nothing and no one in his now crumbling and overcrowded Oran, whose vineyards are ploughed under and whose imams thrive as never before. There is much more to discover and enjoy...
Occasional asides to French Algeria (1830-1962), the war of independence (1955-62) and its 1.5m dead, young Haroun and his mama’s searches and trepidations, internal migration, the sea and the Sun, the only witness of a senseless murder in 1942 with a life-long impact. This wonderful novel will forever be read alongside “The Stranger”. Read this stunner! Highly recommended.

This novel, written by Kamel Daoud, reveals the hidden side of Albert Camus' novel The Stranger. In The Stranger, Camus has his principal character, Meursault, shoot and kill a nameless Arab for no apparent reason other than possible disorientation from sunstroke. In The Meursault Investigation, Daoud names the murdered Arab as 'Musa' (Moses), and considers the implications of the murder from the viewpoint of Musa's brother 'Harun' (Aaron).

Camus was a French-Algerian philosopher, an 'absurdist' who held that human life is absurd. He was also regarded as an existentialist (he disagreed) and a pacifist. He was born in 1913, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and died in 1960. In The Stranger, which was published in 1942, Camus used the murder of the nameless Arab for no reason as an example of the absurdity of human life.

Kamel Daoud is an Algerian journalist based in Oman. His background is similar to that of Camus: French-speaking, Algerian writer and philosopher. The Mersualt Investigation is Daoud's first novel, published in 2015, and it has been recognised with several prizes in France.

In The Mersault Investigatiom, Harun is in a bar in Oman reflecting morosely on his brother, his mother and the book by the listener's hero (Camus). Included in his reflections are thoughts on Algeria, its people and its relationship to France. The tone of the book is pessimistic and its conclusions are ambiguous (much like the tone and content of The Stranger). One is left with the impression that there can be no God, and that life itself can have no meaning.

This is not an enjoyable book to read, because of its pessimistic philosophy, and because nothing conclusive arises from its reflective monologue. No new 'facts' emerge about any of the characters, except that Musa was a real person who was loved by his mother and close the the heart of his younger brother. Still, one has the impression that The Mersault Investigation is a classic in the absurdist philosophical tradition. If you liked Camus' writing, you will certainly appreciate Daoud's. He has created a well-written philosophical sequel to one of Camus' great works.

[I read this in French, and wrote this review for the French edition. But I am repeating it here, slightly modified, since most US readers will presumably turn to the translation. English quotes below are my own versions.]

This is a totally impossible book to read without knowing THE OUTSIDER by Albert Camus, and knowing it well. Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud's first novel (and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt) is about the anonymous Arab murdered half-way through Camus' novel by his protagonist, Meursault. As Daoud remarks, the words "the Arab" appears twenty-five times in the novel, but the victim's given name not once; he is merely a prop in the European's story. Daoud's single character, an Ancient Mariner type named Haroun buttonholing a European visitor in a bar in Oran, gives him one: the murdered man was his elder brother, Moussa.

Moussa and Haroun are the Arabic equivalents of Moses and his brother Aron, who served as his spokesman, just as happens here. Other Old Testament references abound, for example to the story of Cain. During the War of Independence in 1963, Haroun kills a Frenchman named Joseph. The love of his life (also a student of Camus) is called Miriam. And so on. For such an anti-religious work, it makes surprising use of Biblical myth.

But the most consistent tissue of references is to the Camus text. In place of Camus' famous opening, "Mother died today," Daoud begins, "Today, Mama is still living," and the obviously very old mother is soon established as the driving force behind the life of her younger son. Daoud ends with a version of Camus' ending too, and indeed with a rewriting of much of the original's penultimate scene. He says he intends to use lines and facts from the original like stones from a ruined building to build a new edifice. And so he does; readers who know the original well enough to appreciate how he alters it will get the most out of Daoud's book.

But I can't say it was easy going. For almost half the novel, there are no other characters and nothing much happens. Daoud certainly has a valid point that colonization rendered the North African people anonymous and invisible, but 75 pages of Haroun's lament almost proved too much for me; political polemic, however justified, takes you only so far. Then we come to the man that Haroun himself killed, a moral revenge that only made his burden heavier. He undergoes a kind of trial under the revolutionary forces, which parallels Meursault's trial too. He falls in love with Miriam, and he confirms his indifference to God -- also a Camus parallel. Indeed the irony of the book, set against the relative failure of the independent Algerian state, is that Meursault and Haroun, so far from being opposites, end up surprisingly similar.

The thunderous praise for this novel is misplaced. The idea of an Algerian perspective on Camus' The Stranger, and Daoud's narrator's perspective as younger brother were very well conceived, showing imagination and creativity. But the conversational pose of the narrator results in a circular narrative which lacks sufficient clarity of direction. That there is no straight line start to finish story is fine, but the conversational guise defeats the "investigation" (the original French title uses "enquete"). The investigation does not go very far. Put differently my most important compaint is this: I did not find the novel's political point of view sufficiently developed, either as an exploration of colonialism and Camus (a very rich topic), colonialism and the murder/murders, or colonialism and its effects on the narrator, his brother, or his mother. These issues are present, but too latent, needing much more exploration. I am not asking for a post-colonial rant, but for the narrator's more fully developed point of view as the survivor of his colonialist upbringing and of the racism which is clearly reflected in Mersault's original crime. This I would expect of an Algerian journalist.

It would be, I thought, a hard act to follow "the stranger," but "the Meursault Investigation " does it in a nearly impossible manner. The book is brilliant and clearly mirrors Meursault's story in a polemic fashion, but it addedly explores other existential questions about time, the nature of time, and how it can change or not change an existential dilemma. One reviewer commented that the book is short. It is, but so is "the stranger." If it were longer it would all balance compared to its counterpart and equally important to could be inflated to an exhausting, pretentious Sarte-like diatribe, which is not Camus' nor Daoud's style. The book because of its perfect length gets all its points across to the reader in a clear manner. It would not be fitting for the author (Daoud) to have his protagonist's internal dialogue speak in philosophical jargon. The main character does not need to. He comes across as extremely intelligent to counter Camus' protagonist, but more importantly, Daoud's protagonist is given multiple dimensions, given a name, and brought to life over Camus' description of him in the text of "the stranger" - which one-dimensional. I think Daoud's book to be brilliant and I think if Camus were alive, he'd not only approve of it, but would praise it.

A friend recommended Daoud's book and I had looked forward to reading it after an NPR interview, but I was disappointed in his response to "The Stranger." His comments on the stranger--especially the central criticism that the Arab is never named, never considered, brutally demeaned--works effectively and for that, it's worth reading. On the other hand, for me, he goes on too long too often and I didn't find the "clarifying" action, the one that is so important to his mother, satisfying. He failed to make Orun or Algiers as spatially real as the Algiers Camus continues to give readers years after they've put down "The Stranger." Mersault remains a complaint more than a novel.
There are marvelous sentences in Kamel Daoud's "Mersault":
p. 20. I reconstructed the whole thing. … the way my brother had of … showing me his tattoos. Echedda fi Allah, “God is my support.” “March or die” on his right shoulder. “Be quiet” on his left forearm, under a drawing of a broken heart. That was the only book Musa wrote. Shorter than a last sigh, consisting of three sentences on the oldest paper in the world, his own skin.
p. 22. People treat the city like an old harlot, they insult it, they abuse it, they fling garbage in its face, they never stop comparing it to the pure, wholesome little town it used to be in the old days,…
p. 25. The bars still open in this country are aquariums containing mostly bottom-feeders weighed down and scraping along. You come here when you want to escape your age, your god, or your wife, I believe, but in any case haphazardly.
p. 27. These days, my mother’s so old she looks like her own mother,… Mama’s already living in a kind of institution, that is, in her dark little house, her little body huddled up in there like a last piece of hand luggage.

The Meursault Investigation is a mirror critique from the Arab side of the anti-hero of The Outsider, Camus’s novel, matching Meursault with the Arab Musa, ( theunnamed Arab who was killed) who is now given a name by his brother Harun,who buttonholes a Western student in a bar in Oran and relates his own history and story and his relationship with his very own Mama, who is very much alive. The Outsider’s narrative is in the shape of a myth,a myth incarnated in the flesh of each day’s heat. Meursault murders an Arab on the beach at Algiers simply because the sun gets in his eyes.There is an explanation-the sun, but there is no reason why he kills. In Kamel Daoud’s novel we are told Oran is “ a city with its legs spread open towards the sea.” The narrator intends to tell his own story by using “the murderer’s words and expressions” like “ the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind.” The Outsider is presented as the truth which Daoud deconstructs in favour of his brother Musa, the “ corpse he must push to the top of a hill before it rolled down endlessly.” The body was never discovered. Harun still lives in his brother’s shadow. He is treated by his neighbours as a special person who needs care. Harun reflects on colonialism and post-colonialism in modern Algeria and an empty grave.Harun is nostalgic for the weight of a human presence.Like Meursault in The Outsider, we are reliving and narrating a story we can never fully understand.

Harun himself murders a Frenchman 20 years after the killing of the Arab in Camus’s novel. He does this to restore the equilibrium caused by his unknown brother’s death. He is aided and abetted in this by his mother, as they have been the brother and mother of the martyr, Musa. The authorities get to hear of this from his neighbours and he is imprisoned and interrogated. Why didn’t he do it during the period of the war? Why didn’t he join his ‘brothers’ in the resistance? Again he recounts the story of his brother’s murder and the severe injustice of his death, when there was no war on at that period. He is released. He talks of meeting and falling in love with a student from Constantine, Meriem, how she’s investigating the family of the murdered Arab, her introduction of him to Camus’s book. Harun reads and rereads that book as if in a trance,mesmerised by its godless mathematical prose, noticing the word ‘Arab’ is used 25 times( like fateful raps on the doors of his undoing), but his brother is given no name, he was “ technically ephemeral”, he had the “ name of an incident”. The novel is full of the sensuality of brine, sweat, sunlight on a blade,the sea, the blue sky. Harun plays it over and over in his mind(doesn’t show his mother The Outsider, she makes do with 2 newspaper cuttings of the incident), He retells his brother’s life, relives his death, he would die to resurrect his brother. He learns the French language to free himself from the illiterate heritage of his brother and mother, to learn a new precision( outside the tyranny of official religion and the asphyxiation of nationalism).

Harun rails against the callous indifference of the 1000s of Meursaults to Arab life. But he has witnessed “ the post-independence enthusiasm consume itself and the illusions collapse”. The liberated capital looks like “ an outdated actress left over from the days of revolutionary theatre”. His killing of the Frenchman takes place under a luminous moon.So we get an Algerian version of the absurd condition, a commentary on post-colonial failures. The murder refers to the 1962 massacre of Europeans in Oran, which in turn echoed the 1961 murder of Algerians in Paris. In 1990 Algeria descended into civil war between Islamists and the military regime. There is an interplay between French imperialist/Algerian nationalist, French/Arabic,man-written/God-written, Meursault/Harun. He rejects the binary choices: “ Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes”. And where Meursault is visited by a priest, Harun is hounded by “a whole pack of religious fanatics”. He critiques Algeria’s increasing religiosity. Harun becomes an existentialist hero, crying out that “ I’m free ,and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth”. This is a brilliant metaphorical richly dense text, a Wide Sargasso Sea to Camus’s The Outsider, a retread of The Outsider but transferred, reincarnated into the Arabs who must truly possess their land. The outsiders have left, the only battle now is between this life and the life after death. Harun becomes like Meursault a stranger in his own land. Camus's novel planted images in his mind which have taken root.

I am a French teacher who read this book to evaluate its place in a unit I am designing for my students. The unit is about racism, xenophobia, and the effects of colonialism in the Francophone world, and I thought that this book would be an excellent accompaniment to the literary classic L’Étranger. After reading the book, I think it will be a great anchor text for the unit.

The narrator, Harun, is the brother of the murdered nameless Arab in L’Étranger, who is named Musa. Throughout the novel, Harun tells the tale of Musa’s death and its effects on Harun and his family. The history of Algeria (both French-occupied and later independent) is interwoven with Harun’s personal history, providing a good springboard to discuss colonialism with students. The current state of Algeria is bemoaned by Harun, who decries the state of politics, corruption, and religious zealots. The author, Daoud, draws many parallels between the L’Étranger and The Meursault Investigation, both in plot and in characters, making it an excellent resource to compare and contrast with students.

As others have mentioned in their reviews, Daoud’s prose can be somewhat difficult to follow in places. I chose to read this book in English for time but plan on reading it in French later, and I think that the translation could have something to do with the convolution. The novel is also somewhat repetitive in parts, but this could be intentional on Daoud’s part. At some points, you want to yell at Harun that “we get it! Your brother was killed, you have issues with your mother, and you don’t like the state of your country.” Harun’s repetition and dwelling makes him somewhat unlikable to the reader, but also highlights the destructive effect Musa’s murder had on his brother.

Overall, I would highly suggest this book, especially if you are a French teacher who plans on teaching L’Étranger. The topic is especially timely, and your students will be able to connect the two novels and points of views.

I found out about the recent book, “The Meursault Investigation” by Kamel Daoud after hearing about it on “Open Source,” an excellent radio/podcast show hosted by Christopher Lydon. I’m operating from memory and did not go back to check for sure, but as I remember the guests seemed to love the book but even by their description is sounded to me like it was fashioned by today’s easily offended and politically correct culture.

Daoud’s book alters important facts of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel, “The Stranger’’ which to me is annoying in itself. You can sort of dive off another’s superior work I suppose, but at least give the author the dignity of retaining their own facts in their own novel, but Daoud does not.

In “The Stranger’’ Meursault hunts down and shoots a man—an Arab as he is called—on the beach after this Arab stabs Meursault’s new friend who is at that time recovering in a cottage. The assumption is that the shot Arab is the brother of the stabbed man’s girlfriend. Meursault’s friend had slapped around his girlfriend because of some offense and it is assumed that the stabbing was the brother’s revenge for his sister and the shooting revenge for the stabbing. Maybe. Meursault is such a strange character it’s hard to assess what his motives were. You could argue Meursault himself didn’t really understand why he shot the Arab.

“The Stranger” is a philosophical book. Camus (1913-1960) was a kind of essayist and philosopher and often associated with Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) though Camus writes he has no idea why people lump them together. Sartre wrote an essay called, “The Stranger Explained” which really helped me better understand Camus’s book.

There is a disconcerting scene near the end where the condemned Meursault concludes it doesn’t really matter when you die. “Whether now or twenty years from now,” it would all come down to the same thing anyway. Meursault then opens himself up to, “the gentle indifference of the world.” As Sartre’s essay explains, there is no tomorrow to our lives, “they are a succession of present moments.” We only have the present so it must be that the ‘’when’’ of death, the most important question to all of us, is then an absurd concern because it will inevitably be in the present, which is the only thing there is.

In other words, Camus’s book jolts you. Meanwhile, “The Meursault Investigation” concerns itself with injustice, which is fine but not at all at the level that “The Stranger” takes place. “Justice’’ is a societal concept and a typical concern of a novel while questions of the nature of being is a very different challenge. The narrator in Daoud’s book, who is made as the brother of the dead Arab, is essentially pissed because his brother was a murder victim and yet Meursault never gives him the dignity of a name when he writes his story. He’s just, ‘’the Arab.” The Daoud narrator goes on to identify him as “Musa” and gives the victim’s background, etc. Frankly, who cares?

If you interpret ‘’The Stranger” as a philosophical novel, Camus’s expression of the indifference of the universe is better served by an anonymous victim. But Daoud chooses to interpret the novel as personal. As offensive. As an example of colonial oppression. Yet he uses the word “whore” all over the place to describe women without a trace of irony. “We didn’t have a sister,” Daoud’s narrator tells us when changing one of the facts of Camus’s novel, “much less a slutty one, as your hero suggested in his book.”

Daoud’s narrator’s indignation, despite all the intellectual applause the book has gotten, strikes me as narrow. Claire Messud wrote for the “New York Review of Books” a mostly polite review but saying it, “is not of itself an especially interesting work of art.” No it’s not. And I don’t buy that it is much of an intellectually interesting one either.

If it hadn't been for a book group meeting I'd never have finished this tireseome book, which dragged on seemlingly endlessly (despite being less than 150 pages). Even the narrator admits more than once that he's "rambling" on. What is more when I read about "swans' nests" on top of minarets I began to have my doubts about the translator; and have since learnt that the original French version more logically, and as I suspected, did refer to storks' nests, not that this correction would make it a better book! But this basic error did make me wonder whether anything else, in the way of style or meaning, had been lost in translation. Seeing as no one in my book club really enjoyed it either, I for my part can only advise giving this book a wide berth. The wholehearted praise "The Guardian" critic gave it is an utter mystery to me.

In The Meursault Investigation, the "stranger" is fully developed, at once resented, loved and mourned. The tone is searing (v. Stranger's detachment); the language equally sparse. This book has been hailed as a loving tribute to Camus' masterpiece. It has also been recommended as a mandatory accompaniment to The Stranger. I agree with both conclusions. I strongly recommend (re-) reading The Stranger then immediately delving into The Meursault Investigation. You will be enthralled.

You need nerve - le culot - even to think of taking on Camus if you are older than sixteen. Rewrite L'Etranger? From the point of view of drunk, impious Haroun, brother of the murdered Arab? Quelle audace! Also to dare to say that, being Arab and Algerian, there are things you don't like about the original - how the murdered man is always described in the third person, and how - dare we really say it - the Nobel prizewinner doesn't ever really notice Arabs. Camus wrote well about Arab poverty, to be sure, but there are no Arab characters in his books - only a walk-on part in the last, posthumous one, The First Man, and he's stuck in, one rather feels, to show that Camus wanted readers to be aware that not all Arabs endorsed the throwing of bombs in public spaces filled with white French. So why this absence? Was this because he wanted to show us how Arabs aren't seen? Or because he himself, white and Algerian, didn't see them? Read the book alongside the original. If you can, read both in French. (The translation is correct, in the French idiom - it fails to capture the music of Haroun's alcohol-fuelled laments, but Camus, too, is hard to translate.) Daoud is steeped in Camus, and one can cross reference the book, page by page The drunk monologue comes not from The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but from Camus' own novella The Fall, with its derailed cynic lawyer washed up in a Dutch bar. In the last paragraphs Daoud creates a Camus mixtape, taking over Meursault's final speech after the priest has implored him to repent, reprising it as an assault on contemporary Islamic piety. That takes brass, too - and we may recall that a cleric has imposed a fatwa on Daoud. Camus has given many generations the will to live and the inclination to describe the world as it is. Daoud writes with the same controlled anger, recklessness and disregard for nicety as Camus. So please salute Kemal Daoud! Enjoy this! And yes, as Manuel Valls the French Prime Minister remarked in a telephone call to its creator, it is a masterpiece.

This unusual novel is derived from an odd heritage. In 1989 a French author wrote a book (The Stranger) which received some high accolades from small factions of international intellectuals. The book quickly caught on within many Collegiate-level literary groups. At the same time, the original book also received extremely variant reviews from the store reviewers (only about 50% rating the book "excellent" and the other half somewhere between one and four star. Potential readers of the Meursault Investigation should keep in mind that this book is from the store's "Mid-Eastern" collection of literature. This particular book relates "the other side of the story" from the main character in "Stranger." While some of the content was interesting to me being a Westerner, I still wonder at how much may have been lost in translation for many readers, myself included. I found many of the passages awkward to relate to. None of this is to say, entirely detrimental ... Just be certain you know what you're getting into before you buy the book yourself. French intellectuals are particularly keen on this novel, and it does require a reasonably worldly, open mind to fully appreciate. I do not choose to debate its literary prowess, however, all fairness, it definitely is NOT a book that will appeal to a wide range of readers ... especially many of those who are forced to read it by a college professor.

The Meursault Investigation reexamines Albert Camus's famous classic 'The Stranger' from a new perspective: from the viewpoint of the brother of "The Arab" who is murdered by Meursault on the beach. This is a wonderful and creative companion piece to the original novel. Daoud writes with warmth and emotion so that this novel stands in stark contrast to Camus's acetic style. At the same time, the novel works in parallel with The Stranger and considers some of the same existential questions. The shape of the novel is the same as well in that both start with a mother and end with an examination of the meaning of death. It's not a perfect novel (there are some long-winded and repetitive parts), but if I were a teacher, I'd teach The Meursault Investigation in conjunction with The Stranger. If you're thinking about reading this, I'd strongly recommend you reread The Stranger first.

This alternate telling of The Stranger is marvelous. If you're unfamiliar with the original, read it first--preferably right before reading this. The narration style is jumpy, but easy enough to follow. The parallels between the two books are undeniable. I'd argue this one is better.

This counter piece to Camus' "L'Etranger" attempts to redress the balance. In the original novel it is only the French protagonist's consciousness and conscience that are in play, the "Arab" victim is a nameless prop for the plot. In Daoud's retelling, he has a story, a family, and a younger brother who one day takes revenge- against a nameless "foreigner". So goes the cycle of violence.

Read Camus' 1942 novel first and then Daoud's response, a long time in coming: the Algerian perspective.
Camus, a French Algerian, was ambivalent about independence. In his novel, the Arab has no name. Daoud gives
him a name, a life, and humanity, which makes his death tragic.

I was compelled to read this book by its presence on the NY Times best-seller list. The story and its telling are quite a diversion from what I'm used to reading from American and English authors. Frankly, I'm not certain I understand the meaning in the story but I'm not surprised by that.

The Arab perspective of The Stranger by Camus is well written and transcends the original. I believe through reading we can understand each other better and this is a work of literature that can accomplish this.

This is not for a casual reader. The questions posed to me by the store are far too simplified for the answers to be of use to anyone. If the reader has not read Camus' "The Stranger", he will be at a disadvantage. The book explores in depth the notion of anonymity in death - not the killers', but the victim's. It is an exquisite "rest-of-the-story" imagining loaded with existential explorations worthy of Camus himself.

Once you get past the "clever" premise of Meursault being Camus, the rest rides on the back of "The Stranger" but is really much less interesting. It takes one aspect of the Camus novel and blows it up into a "Real Issue", which it isn't. I can't help but wonder if this book would get as much attention or praise if written by someone who wasn't Algerian...

Potential readers should keep in mind that this book is from the store's "Mid-Eastern" collection of literature. While much of the content, philosophy, politics and dialog were interesting to me, being an American, I'm concerned much may have been lost in translation for many other readers, myself included. Also, Western thinking is so far removed from traditional Middle Eastern mainstream lifestyle and values, I found many of the passages awkward to relate to. None of this is to say, entirely detrimental ... because I still found large portions of the book to be exotic, enlightening and resulting in a fascinating read. Just be certain you know what you're getting into before you buy the book yourself. French intellectuals are particularly keen on this novel, and it does require a reasonably worldly, open mind to fully appreciate.

"The Meursault Investigation" a remarkable work by Kamel Daoud which goes beyond its meta-fictional origins as a sequel to and meditation on "The Stranger" by Albert Camus to become a powerful story in its own right as well as an examination of identity and the absurd. The story is told by Haroun who identifies the previously nameless Arab shot and killed by Meursault in "The Stranger" as being his brother Musa. Haroun sits in a bar talking to a stranger about his life, telling how his brother's murder and the book which left his brother nameless haunted his entire existence. In the end the narrator Haroun turns out to have issues with his Mama, the consequences of an absurd murder and trial and to be something of a stranger and outsider himself.

After previously reading "The Literary Companion series of essays on The Stranger" I noted that Camus could not have anticipated the variety of interpretations or how social, cultural and historical changes have impacted how the book is thought about. He certainly did not conceive, 75 years after publishing "The Stranger", a celebrated prize winning book written in French by Algerian author Kamel Daoud would give a name to his unnamed Arab victim, however he likely would have smiled at the absurdity of it all.

"The Meursault Investigation" is beautifully translated from the original French into English by John Cullen and you can read an excerpt in the April 6, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

as much as i loved "the stranger".. i hated this book. what pissed me off most is the author using the fame of "the stranger" to sell the book.
the story has absolutely nothing to do with the existential (nihilistic) idea that "the stranger" managed to deliver in a very beautiful way.
the writing style is so repetitive and weak, and the story has no deep philosophical relation with "the stranger".
i am just sorry for the writer for being such a fame-seeker and having to use a very famous book in order to make a name for himself. this is a very cheap behaviour.

Potential readers should keep in mind that this book is from the store's "Mid-Eastern" collection of literature. While much of the content, was interesting to me being an American, I still wonder at how much may have been lost in translation for many readers, myself included. Also, Western societies are so far removed from traditional Middle Eastern mainstream values and lifestyle, I found many of the passages awkward to relate to. None of this is to say, entirely detrimental ... because I still found large portions of the book to be exotic, enlightening and resulting in a fascinating read. Just be certain you know what you're getting into before you buy the book yourself. French intellectuals are particularly keen on this novel, and it does require a reasonably worldly, open mind to fully appreciate.

This remarkable novel will be from now assigned in schools and colleges as the contemporary political sequel to Camus's " The Stranger". What I love so much about this book is that it brings Algerian history to the core of the shame that gave us the slogan "Blacks lives Matter". But it does something else, something that is the job of novels to do. It shows with incredible perceptiveness how hard it is to enjoy falling in love when you are not given proper legitimacy in your own country. Finally a bookclub book that can actually make us think and even act !

Another guy working on the back of Camus. I couldn't stand this book. It didn't offer any insight at all, just riding on some guy's fame, trying to settle the old Algerian question. Well then, I wasn't convinced.