The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (Oneworld, £8.99)
Kamel Daoud is one of Algeria’s most outspoken journalists, often criticising his own country and the wider Muslim world for its lack of advancement since the colonial era ended. His debut novel, The Meursault Investigation, which fell two votes short of winning the Prix Goncourt, analyses why civil war and bad governance has plagued the country since independence from France in 1962. It has also got him death threats from Islamists unhappy with his sceptical take on religion, and attacks from the secular political establishment in Algeria.
The novel is a clever response to Albert Camus’s existentialist novel L’etranger (1942), in which the French-Algerian narrator Meursault kills an unnamed Arab on the beach. In Daoud’s work our narrator is the victim’s brother (whose real name, we learn, was Musa) who wants to hold the murderer to account: “The original guy was such a good storyteller, he managed to make people forget his crime, whereas the other one was a poor illiterate God created for the sole purpose of taking a bullet and returning to dust.”
Our narrator mocks Meursault for his “chilly indifference,” but Daoud shows how he comes to resemble the French settler. Spurred on by his grieving mother, he kills a soldier in revenge for his brother’s death. He feels as little guilt about the killing as Meursault did for his crime: “He was only a Frenchman,” he says dismissively. As well as Camus, the novel also draws on the works of anti-colonial writer Franz Fanon, who in his analysis of the Algerian struggle for independence, warned that postcolonial elites were in danger of becoming the mirror image of their previous rulers.
This is a powerful, tautly written novel that pays homage to Camus in its technique while it brings a caustic analysis of Algerian society that is all Daoud’s own.
Kamel Daoud is one of Algeria’s most outspoken journalists, often criticising his own country and the wider Muslim world for its lack of advancement since the colonial era ended. His debut novel, The Meursault Investigation, which fell two votes short of winning the Prix Goncourt, analyses why civil war and bad governance has plagued the country since independence from France in 1962. It has also got him death threats from Islamists unhappy with his sceptical take on religion, and attacks from the secular political establishment in Algeria.
The novel is a clever response to Albert Camus’s existentialist novel L’etranger (1942), in which the French-Algerian narrator Meursault kills an unnamed Arab on the beach. In Daoud’s work our narrator is the victim’s brother (whose real name, we learn, was Musa) who wants to hold the murderer to account: “The original guy was such a good storyteller, he managed to make people forget his crime, whereas the other one was a poor illiterate God created for the sole purpose of taking a bullet and returning to dust.”
Our narrator mocks Meursault for his “chilly indifference,” but Daoud shows how he comes to resemble the French settler. Spurred on by his grieving mother, he kills a soldier in revenge for his brother’s death. He feels as little guilt about the killing as Meursault did for his crime: “He was only a Frenchman,” he says dismissively. As well as Camus, the novel also draws on the works of anti-colonial writer Franz Fanon, who in his analysis of the Algerian struggle for independence, warned that postcolonial elites were in danger of becoming the mirror image of their previous rulers.
This is a powerful, tautly written novel that pays homage to Camus in its technique while it brings a caustic analysis of Algerian society that is all Daoud’s own.
