Book Review: The Meursault Investigation

The Meursault Investigationby Kamel Daoudtranslated from the French by John CullenOther Press, 2015Albert Camus' 1942 novel L'Etranger has been quietly begging for a literary rejoinder for seventy years now, and in 2013 it received perhaps the best one it's ever likely to get: in that year Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud published his novel Meursault, contre-enquete, which purports to tell the story of the Arab man Camus' character Meursault shoots to death in the novel the English-speaking world knows as The Stranger. In Daoud's book, now translated into English by John Cullen from Other Press as The Meursault Investigation, that dead Arab is given a name – Musa – and a life-story, told in a series of bitter reflections by his brother Harun.Harun is telling his brother's story in a bar in Oran (“People come here looking for money, or the sea, or a heart,” he comments. “No one was ever born here; everybody comes from the other side of the only mountain in sight”), telling it to a Western young student who never speaks a word (the uninterrupted drone of the book's self-righteous, self-pitying monologue is virtually identical to that found in Moshin Hamid's 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but since that book was an enormous bestseller, some readers may find the resemblance a recommendation). We get the impression Harun has been telling the story for years, the story of his brother the “brief Arab, technically ephemeral, who lived for two hours and has died incessantly for seventy years.”The story is fascinating, mainly thanks to Daoud's lean, vivid writing style, but also because of the many dozens of juxtapositions with The Stranger – including all the juxtapositions that are entirely editorial. Unlike the vast majority of pastiche fiction, The Meursault Investigation actually knows it's a pastiche; it knows it can't escape the long shadow of Camus' famous novel, and it draws narrative strength from that fact:

I'm sure you're like everyone else, you've read the tale as told by the man who wrote it. He writes so well that his words are like precious stones, jewels cut with the utmost precision. A man very strict about shades of meaning, your hero was; he practically required them to be mathematical. Endless calculations, based on gems and minerals. Have you seen the way he writes? He's writing about a gunshot, and he makes it sound like poetry!

In fact, for all the passion and unsettling insight of The Meursault Investigation, some of its best passages almost can't help but thrive in an entirely symbiotic tandem with the Camus novel; you can see Daoud's efforts to help his book stand on independent footing – one goal is clearly to free Camus' famous story from its grubby imperialist telling – and you mostly see those efforts fail. Some of Daoud's most powerful and eloquent passages will make virtually no sense to a reader who isn't familiar with the Camus book – and they'll make a reader who is familiar with The Stranger smile and nod in gratitude at being prompted to see a familiar classic in invigorating new ways:

What I mean to say is, your hero had a life that shouldn't have led him to such murderous idleness. He was starting to get famous, he was young and free, he had a paying job, and he was capable of seeing things as they are. He should have moved to Paris by then, or married Marie. Why did he have to go to that very beach on that very day? What's inexplicable is not only the moment but also the fellow's life. He's a corpse that magnificently describes the quality of the light in this country while stuck in some hereafter with no gods and no hells.

It's true that sometimes the aforementioned whining gets a bit irritating. When Harun tells his mute interlocutor “He was Musa to us, his family, his neighbors, but it was enough for him to venture a few meters into the French part of the city, a single glance from one of them was enough, to make him lose everything, starting with his name, which went floating off into some blind spot in the landscape,” you first just nod along and then, belatedly, want to interrupt and remind Harun that in Camus' famous novel, Musa gets shot because he pulls a knife on Meursault, not because he'd accidentally wandered into the path of the French colonial juggernaut.But it's in the initial nodding that all the magic of Daoud's book can be found. This is one of those rare pastiche novels (like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea) that fundamentally revamps our reading of its inspiration. The Meursault Investigation has won its author a shelf of awards, and they are all deserved; it's a vigorously thought-provoking debut.