The Meursault Investigation

Kamel Daoud tr. by John Cullen (Oneworld, 143pp, £8.99, Oldie price £8.54)

IN L’ETRANGER, Camus’s anti-hero Meursault murders an Algerian named only in the book as ‘the Arab’. The project of the Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud’s widely admired novel — it won the Goncourt first novel prize in France — is to re-approach the story from the Arab’s point of view. Narrated by the dead man’s brother, the book both gives him a name — Musa — and attempts to undo the dehumanising project of Camus by building his own story out of ‘the murderer’s words and expressions’, like ‘stones from the old houses the colonists left behind’. Against Camus’s existentialism, Daoud pits the complexities of colonial history, racial identity and religious faith.

‘Daoud gives us the perspective of the dead man’s brother; the unnamed victim is no longer a cipher in an existentialist drama, but a person who can and must be mourned,’ found the FT’S Azadeh Moaveni. ‘Daoud executes this enormous task nimbly, but there is far more to his book than a clever deconstruction of a canonical novel. The Meursault Investigation is also a meditation on bereavement and a lament for the growing hold of conservative Islam on post-independence Algeria. That a cleric in Algeria last year called Daoud an apostate and demanded his execution only underscores the fragility of the Algeria he writes about with such passion.’

‘Where Camus’s vision is cold and stripped of emotion, Daoud’s is sensuous, comical and passionate,’ enthused Robin Yassin-kassab in the Guardian: ‘For its incandescence, its precision of phrase and description, and its cross-cultural significance, The Meursault Investigation is an instant classic.’

Fiona Wilson in the Times was scarcely less impressed: ‘How easily this could have become a po-faced pretentious literary exercise. Instead we have a clever and suspenseful work that is a masterpiece in its own right.’