A graduate student interviews a man who claims to be the brother of the unknown Arab killed in Camus' novel The Stranger.

This is an extraordinary rebuttal of the anonymity of "The Arab" murdered by the Frenchman in L'Etranger (The Stranger/ The Foreigner/ The Other) by Albert Camus, written from the perspective of the brother of the murdered man. The book takes us into the world of colonized Algeria and to some degree into the minds of colonized Algerian people - people in their own country who are "the other" to the dominant French prior to 1963. As I wrote to the author, Kamel Daoud, "C'est extraordinaire. J'ai apprendre. Pardonez-moi la francaise." ( )

این رمان داستان بیگانه‌ی کامو رو از زاویه‌ی دید مقتول و خانواده‌ش تعریف می‌کنه... حقیقتاً فکر می‌کردم رمان بهتری باشه اما در واقع داستانی بود که نویسنده توی هفتاد درصدش یه حرف رو تکرار می‌کرد.... داستان تقریباً دیالوگ نداره و ریتمش کنده خود داستان هم برام جذابیتی نداشت .... از اواسط داستان که پای ژوزف و انقلاب الجزایر به داستان باز شد داستان داشت یه مقدار جون می‌گرفت اما نویسنده خیلی سریع و سرسری ازش رد شد... در کل برای من لذت‌بخش نبود ( )

The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud is an Algerian answer to Albert Camus’ story The Stranger in which a Frenchman, Meursault, casually murders an Arab on the beach at Algiers. This short novel is supposedly narrated by the brother of the murdered Arab and is told some 70 years after the event.

In The Stranger much is written about Meursault, his feelings, his reactions, his story and yet the victim of the crime remains a nameless Arab. In this account we are given his name, Musa, and although he is unable to speak for himself, his brother, Harun, tells of his family and home. One of the tragedies of this story is the fact that Harun and his mother were unable to claim the body, as his name is never entered into any of the official records. The mother, tremendously grief-stricken becomes obsessed with seeking retribution. In an effort to appease his Mother, Harun kills a French settler, but instead of calling attention by committing a revenge murder, his action is considered a badly-timed killing as it occured shortly after the cease-fire that signalled the end of the war for independence.

The Meursault Investigation is a literary re-telling but in this version it is more than a simple counterpoint to the original. The country of Algeria becomes more than just the setting as the author meditates on the post-colonial failures of his country and doesn’t particularly sing out praises for how it is now being run. The author has received mixed reactions to this book, some shower him with literary acclaim, while many right-wing Muslims feel he should be on trial for blasphemy. ( )

So 4.5 stars. Camus’ The Stranger meets Daoud’s The Other. The idea of writing this story from the unnamed murdered Arab’s point of view (his brother’s really) is brilliant. Would have been 5 stars* but for the amount of apparent repetition; is the repetition a planned literary strategy? Or just filler for the lack of more substance? I want to lean towards literary strategy, that he’s building on (channeling?) Camus’ work, but I’m not entirely sure.

The echoes / counterpoints from The Stranger are well done. “Have you seen the way he writes? He’s writing about a gunshot, and he makes it sound like poetry!”

“Mama’s still alive today”

“the darkness devoured what remained of his humanity; all I could see now was his shirt, which reminded me of his empty eyes that morning- or the morning before, I couldn’t remember.”

And as much as Camus’ Stranger was on trial for his indifference in his relationship with his mother, Daoud’s Other talks about his mother all the time, yet “You want the truth? I rarely go to see my mother nowadays.”

And of the trial, Camus’ Stranger was on trial for this indifference, while Daoud’s Other was on trial for his failure to fight in the resistance.

I found the lack of a body confusing. No body, no crime, right? The book “overwhelmed me with its sublime lying and its magical accord with my life. A strange story, isn’t it? Let’s summarize: We have a confession, written in the first person but we have no other evidence to prove Meursault’s guilt; his mother never existed, for him least of all…”. So is Daoud treating this lack of a body metaphorically? Or since no name, no way to claim the body? (This and the drumbeat of sheer repetition kept this from being 5 stars*)

And I found the parallels of the Stranger and the Other (Musa) intriguing. “This man, your writer, seemed to have stolen my twin Zujj, my own description, and even the details of my life and my memories of my interrogation! I read almost the whole night through, laboriously, word by word. It was a perfect joke. I was looking for traces of my brother in the book, and what I found there instead was my own reflection, I discovered I was practically the murderer’s double.”

And the Other’s sentence (self inflicted perhaps?)
“That cemetery was the place where I awakened to life, believe me. It was where I became aware that I had a right to the fire of my presence in the world- yes, I had a right to it! - despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled down endlessly.” (And a nod to The Myth of Sisyphus)

And throughout, Musa descriptions of himself cast himself as an Other, an Outsider, just as much as Camus’ narrator is an other, an outsider. (And interestingly, Camus’ name is never mentioned in Daoud’s work.). And he rejects religion as did Meursault. (The 2nd half of the book is really about this)

I like how he directly addresses the reader. I think this creates an intimacy. And draws us in. “No, the first night, I always pick up the tab. By the way, what’s your name?”
(What’s your name? - such playfulness)

And Daoud’s exploration of the meaning “Meursault”: “Is it “meurt seul, dies alone? Meurt sot, dies a fool? Never dies?”

Or elsewhere “Ah! Just one last joke, of my own invention. Do you know how “Meursault” is pronounced in Arabic? You don’t? El-Mersoul, “The Envoy” or “the messenger.”

And other reviews explore that early drafts used the name “Mersault ” possibly lifted from an earlier work of Camus’ La Mort heureuse in which the character Mersault goes swimming in a scene described in sensuous terms. So is it “mer” (sea) and “sault” / “saut” (jump), jump into the sea (saut à la mer). [literature.stackexchange.com]

Though a shift to “Meur” signifying death “served his novelistic purposes in every other way” [Kaplan, Looking for the Stranger]

And as I discussed in my notes on The Stranger, would the racist overtones been avoided by just killing a man, as opposed to killing an Arab? Does calling him an Arab dehumanize him more than just calling him a man? Would it have been the same novel? How does Camus write a book about the nature of being and yet be blind to how he treats this character?

Daoud spends considerable time exploring the lack of naming his brother, the killing of the Frenchman, and the relationship between the French colonists and the native Algierians. He clearly presents a different view of the French colonization.

*and then there’s the issue of misogyny; Daoud’s descriptions of the city basically as a whore with her legs spread wide and other misogynistic descriptions isn’t going to sit well with many Western readers.

PS. Daoud was a crime reporter. A favorite quip he made in an interview: “What made ‘The Wire’ so great is that it’s a collaboration between a writer and a policeman, the dogs of the world”. ( )