‘Meursault’ puts Camus on trial
Algerian Daoud incorporates, reworks bits of ‘The Stranger’
Kamel Daoud’s “The Meursault Investigation” turns Albert Camus’ novel “The Stranger” inside out in a provocative, exciting and occasionally irritating way. Like the late Nobel laureate Camus, Daoud is an important voice in the world of Algerian writing, but an independent one who annoys hard-liners and the orthodox.
To approximate the affect of Daoud’s novel, imagine a retelling of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in the voice of Tom Robinson’s brother — with acid commentary on the quality of justice available in Maycomb.
In “The Stranger” Meursault, a young French Algerian man shoots and kills an Arab man on the beach. The dead man is never named.
Harun, the narrator of “The Meursault Investigation,” claims that the dead man was Musa, his older brother. Harun talks about the text of “The Stranger” as though the book were written by Meursault himself.
“I know the book by heart, I can recite it to you like the Quran,” he says. To Harun, Meursault’s biggest crime isn’t the murder per se, but the way Meursault’s story depersonalizes his brother:
“A man who knows how to write kills an Arab who, on the day he dies, doesn’t even have a name, as if he’d hung it on a nail somewhere before stepping onto the stage.”
Musa’s body was never found. He seems to have vanished from the annals of the world itself, leaving his mother unable to receive death benefits.
In an attempt to prove his brother’s existence, Harun investigates nearly every element of Meursault’s crime, finding reasons to question everything.
“The Meursault Investigation” is suffused with the spirit of Camus. It incorporates and reworks bits of “The Stranger” and is set in Oran, site of Camus’ second novel, “The Plague.”
Daoud even gives Camus a walk-on in his novel, as a ghostly figure in the bar with “a philosopher’s forehead.”
Harun also pays Camus a backhanded compliment, referencing the reported inspiration for “The Stranger”: “Just try to imagine the level of genius required to take a local news item two paragraphs long and transform it into tragedy, describing the scene and the famous beach, grain by grain.”
Especially in the opening chapters, Daoud’s novel closely resembles Camus’ “The Fall”: an older man tells his confessional story to an unknown listener in a bar.
Like Clamence, the judge-penitent of Camus’ “The Fall,” Harun can be an irritating monologuist, weaving digression and rhetorical flourishes in and around his obsession. The Meursault Investigation: A Novel. The elderly Algerian talks to an unknown French scholar, frequently casting him as a representative of Merusault’s world, the colonial Other.
Yet Harun reveals himself to be nearly as estranged as Meursault, an apostate who drinks, shunned and mocked by his religious neighbors in an Islamic country.
Harun, too, has killed. In this case, a Frenchman, “because I had to counterbalance the absurdity of our situation.”
Just as Meursault is convicted and sentenced to die less for the actual murder and more for his callous behavior afterward, Harun is called to account not for shooting a Frenchman, but for he shot him: after Algerian independence, rather than before.
“In the first days of Independence, death was as gratuitous, absurd, and unexpected as it had been on a sunny beach in 1942.”
This is one of many pointed comments Harun makes about life in Algeria today, loathing both the architecture of the mosque outside his apartment and its imam: “Sometimes, I’m tempted to climb up that prayer-tower, reach the level where the loudspeakers are hung, lock myself in, and belt out my wildest assortment of invective and sacrilege.”
Daoud’s novel may have unexpected resonance for American readers in a time of increased public focus on the deaths of black men in encounters with police.
Whatever the specific facts of each incident, the marches and protests that have followed collectively echo Harun’s cry:
when
My brother was a human being. Remember his name.