Retelling Camus’ classic
One book begins with Mama still alive, the other with Maman’s death. One story, two perspectives. This is how Algerian writer Kamel Daoud blows up the very first sentence of Albert Camus’ 1943 French classic, The Stranger. If L’Étranger is the story of an everyman who murders a nameless Arab on a beach only to be found guilty for the moral defect of failing to cry at his mother’s funeral, this is the audacious kick-in-the-groin response. And now The Meursault Investigationis having its own moment. Published last year in France as Meursault, contreenquête in time for Camus’ 100th birth anniversary, it is the recipient of France’s prestigious Goncourt First Novel Prize; and the author, a fatwa.
The novel is simultaneously a rebuttal and a loving embrace of the book that once was the embodiment of a male adolescent’s ideas of rebellion at the futility of the commonplaces of life — career, marriage, belief in God — which later became a post-colonial studies joke.
“When you opened the door of this bar, you opened a grave, my young friend,” says Harun, a retired land administration official in his 70s. He has been waiting all these years to tell the right person quite the story — of Cain and Abel; his brother Musa, “the common bit player,” and the killer Meursault; the sea and the sky; and finally, his own story.
Daoud invests a chatty gregariousness to his narrator who provides an exegesis of the classic novel, now described as a reallife memoir and not a book of fiction. He laments that the stark beauty of Camus/ Meursault’s prose has obliterated any sense of his brother Musa.
Over a couple of days, Harun lays out his argument — no one cared about Mama and his 7-year-old self as they embarked on their counter-investigation; Musa was not protecting his sister from an abusive boyfriend as stated; they didn’t even have a sister whose honour could be defended; and the woman in question was just a whore. “What was never anything other than a banal score-settling that got out of hand was elevated to a philosophical crime,” argues our book’s hero.
The lives of the mother and son couple spiral downwards, Mama obsessed with mourning while ignoring her living son. They leave Algiers for the village. There a priest encourages the child to attend school, introducing him to the language of the colonizers, and a way to satisfy his illiterate mother’s hunger for answers.
Whereas Camus strikes a narrative of mostly short, crisp sentences, Daoud’s stand-in speaks from memory, tracing and retracing his story, adding new thoughts and embellishments.
Twenty years pass when the expected finally occurs. The War for National Lib- eration is over and within two hours, the young land administration official, his mother at his elbow, has murdered Joseph Larquais, a Frenchman hiding in their recently “liberated” home. Still, he finds no respite: he is neither hero nor criminal. He is considered suspect for sidestepping the real fight in 1962.
Daoud is smart enough not to try to mimic Camus’ style. However, the bar stool warmer’s garrulous punchiness does stop on occasion. While describing his feelings before turning himself in to the newly powerful, he recognizes the genius of his nemesis: “He describes the world as if he’s going to die at any moment, as if he has to choose his words with an economy of breathing.”
If there is a problem, it is Daoud’s decision, in a book filled to the brim with parallels, to substitute Camus’ anonymous Arab with historyless women. The experiences of “that whore” are described as a “tall tale.” Mama gets no other name although the long-absent father does. Is this a flaw or does the author mean to say that the “other” will always exist? It may be suppressed, but will always reappear somewhere else.
The Meursault Investigation follows The Stranger right to the end albeit on an extended time delay. Modern-day Algeria is appropriately Camusian, its showy piety a grand absurdity. And Harun sees the greater joke, that he is “practically the murderer’s double.”
The book has one last joke. We never find out who came through the door of the bar.