The murderer got famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language.
The Meursault Investigation is a modern response to Albert Camus' classic of Absurdism, The Stranger. In the original, a French Algerian (like Camus himself) is adrift and unemotional in the wake of his mother's death, and unprovoked, he kills “an Arab” on the beach; the ensuing trial focusses more on this Meursault's lack of “proper” response to his mother's death than the actual crime. In this book, a native Algerian (like the author, Kamel Daoud, himself) invites a barroom stranger to listen to his story: Not only did that Arab on the beach have a name, but a family; the speaker is the victim's brother and, knowing that this stranger has with him a copy of the book that had made the murderous Meursault famous, he'd like an opportunity to speak for the unnamed in that original tale. Continuing in the Absurdist tradition, Daoud traces events from the speaker's life that mark him as an outsider to his society – from Algeria's war of Independence in the 1960s, in which he did not fight, to its current grip in Islamic Fundamentalism, in which he does not believe – and Daoud not only deconstructs Camus' book in order to build his own, he creates a protagonist in the victim's brother who, in countless ways, mirrors Meursault. Because this book is set in a world where Meursault was a real person who wrote a book that became a classic, it's hard to say whether the mirroring of experiences and beliefs are a matter of mutual Fate (that warm wind blowing from the future) or a fatalistic mimicry knowingly employed by the protagonist, but Daoud is able to use the conceit to demonstrate the philosophy of Absurdism in much the same manner Camus did originally; plus ça change... I am delighted to have read these two books so close together and the interplay between them elevates them both.
Yes, Mama's still alive today, and that fact leaves me completely indifferent. I feel bad about this, I swear, but I can't forgive her. I was her object, not her son. She doesn't speak anymore. Maybe because there's nothing left of Musa's body to carve up. I recall, time and time again, the way she would crawl inside my skin, the way she would do all the talking for me when we have visitors, her passions and her nastiness and her crazy eyes when she lost her temper.The “Arab” has a name: He was Musa (Moses) and our narrator is his brother Harun (Aaron). And while Camus' book left Musa bleeding on the beach with nary another mention of him, Harun shows us that blood and tells us how it stained his family going forward; how the aftereffects of French colonisation have stained Algeria even fifty years on. Whether it was Fate or a need for revenge against the French in general, Harun eventually commits an unprovoked murder of his own, and while Meursault had had a Crucifix waved in front of his face by a prosecutor in an attempt to elicit an acceptable response from him, Harun has a colonel wave a small Algerian flag in his; to the same, absurd, affectless response. The fact that Harun follows so closely in Meursault's footsteps adds a layer of irony that modernity seems to demand, but it does nothing to undermine this book's purpose: Harun lives in a society today that is every bit as suffocating as the one that Meursault found himself bucking against seventy years ago. Back then, a Frenchman could murder an Arab, or beat his Arab mistress, and the authorities would look the other way. Today, Harun reckons he'd be publicly stoned if he were “to cry 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.” And Harun is probably right: In the wake of this book's acclaim, an Algerian imam pronounced a fatwa against Daoud for apostasy.
Those last lines overwhelmed me. A masterpiece, my friend. A mirror held up to my soul and to what would become of me in this country, between Allah and ennui.I enjoyed the conversational, second person format of this book. (It reminded me of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but having not read more of Camus, I didn't recognise the format as having been employed by him in The Fall. I didn't need to have read The Myth of Sisyphus to get the reference when Harun speaks of “the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly”.) This format felt informal and confidential – while making it seem natural when Harun would refer to the fact of Meursault's book – and I further liked it when Harun would make a grand and polished statement followed by, “Sorry if that sounded rehearsed”, because of course his story would be rehearsed, having been gone over for the past seventy years (if only in his own mind). Overall, The Meursault Investigation refreshes the concepts that Camus was writing about and feels like an overdue response from a postcolonial society. As for his interpretation of Camus' philosophy of the Absurd, I think Daoud explained it best in an interview with npr:
I have noticed that people who function within a closed philosophical system are the ones that practice the absurd, and those people are the ones who end up killing others. On the other hand the man who understands that the world is absurd, he's in a position to make sense of the world, to find meaning. It is because I know the world is absurd that I'm not going to kill you. But if I somehow figure out that the world has meaning, I can kill you in the name of that meaning. It's called Nazism, Jihadism, Islamism, and the extreme right...You take a man who kills another, and if you add a woman you call it an honor killing. If you add a flag, you call it war, and if you remove both you can call it a crime. The fundamental question of our time is what prevents us from killing. What is most important is how we define what is sacred about life.And doesn't that sound like an important thing to write – and to read – about? I might not rate The Meursault Investigation as highly if it hadn't come straight on the heels of The Stranger, but together, they both get the full five.
