The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud
I've taken a brief diversion from Camus' work itself to read this book that uses The Stranger as a starting point for an investigation of Algerian colonialism. It was interesting and enlightening.
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“What can I tell you, Mr. Investigator, about a crime committed in a book?”
The Meursault Investigation takes as its beginning a central point of The Stranger: the murder of “an Arab'' by Meursault. This man is a minor character and unnamed, but is a crucial event in Meursault’s story, murdered for no real reason: only as an instrument to tell the theory of The Absurd. The narrator of The Meursault Investigation is the murdered man’s brother Harun, who tells us that his brother was named Musa. In the aftermath of Musa’s murder, Harun and his mother are left knowing nothing about the murder at all, and the book details Hamud’s life after the murder. His brother’s death reverberates through his life and now Hamud is an old man: “A brief Arab, technically ephemeral, who lived for two hours and has died incessantly for seventy years, long after his funeral.”
This has been called retelling of The Stranger from the Algerian perspective. However to me it rang most strongly as an examination and indictment of colonialism, and using Camus’ novel to springboard to this theme felt fitting, because Dauod has conceptualised the idea and practice of colonialism–in Algeria here but in reality everywhere–as absurd. Even if it is absurd and not Absurd as Camus might have meant the term, the parallels just seemed to fit.
Daoud has said that this novel is, “a dialogue with Camus,” who was an influence to Daoud as an Algerian writer. In an NPR interview, he says:
"It is the fundamental question about freedom, about what is freedom. I'm born alone and I die alone. This gives me the right to interrogate the world, and to put the world into question the way I choose," he says. "For me fundamentally, the absurd — Camus' absurd — gave me back my feeling of dignity.
I will try to summarise this very simply: I have noticed that people who function within a closed philosophical system are the ones that practise 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."
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/21/432618805/novelist-kamel-daoud-finding-dignity-in-the-absurd
I enjoyed reading this book. It’s a well-written endlessly fascinating look at Algerian-Arab identity with a narrative that weaves in and out of Camus’ work but in the end stands alone as an individual work that goes much further than simply an answer to The Stranger. There is more philosophy here too, and the beginning of a dialogue between Daoud and Islam, causing him to run afoul of some religious Algerian leaders. As a part of my exploration of Camus, The Meursault Investigation has been a fruitful offshoot.
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