Kamel Daoud. (2015). The Meursault Investigation: A Novel. Other Press.

Kamel Daoud. 2015. The Meursault Investigation: A Novel. Other Press.

Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation: A Novel. Other Press, 2015.

Kamel Daoud. The Meursault Investigation: A Novel. Other Press, 2015.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Daoud, Kamel
   • bioText: Kamel Daoud is an Algerian journalist based in Oran, where he writes for theQuotidien d’Oran—the third largest French-language Algerian newspaper. His articles have appeared in Libération, Le Monde, and Courrier International, and are regularly reprinted around the world. A finalist for the Prix Goncourt, The Meursault Investigation won the Prix François Mauriac and the Prix des Cinq-Continents de la francophonie. International rights to the novel have been sold in twenty countries. A dramatic adaptation of The Meursault Investigation will be performed at the 2015 Festival d’Avignon, and a feature film is slated for release in 2017.
   • name: Kamel Daoud
2. • role: Translator
   • fileAs: Cullen, John
   • name: John Cullen

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2015-06-02T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Meursault Investigation

fullDescription

A New York Times Notable Book of 2015
“A tour-de-force reimagining of Camus’s The Stranger, from the point of view of the mute Arab victims.” —The New Yorker
 
He was the brother of “the Arab” killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus’s classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling’s memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name—Musa—and describes the events that led to Musa’s casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach.
               
In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his broken heart, on his anger with men desperate for a god, and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A stranger among his own people, he wants to be granted, finally, the right to die.
               
The Stranger is of course central to Daoud’s story, in which he both endorses and criticizes one of the most famous novels in the world. A worthy complement to its great predecessor, The Meursault Investigation is not only a profound meditation on Arab identity and the disastrous effects of colonialism in Algeria, but also a stunning work of literature in its own right, told in a unique and affecting voice.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New Yorker
   • content: "A tour-de-force reimagining of Camus's The Stranger, from the point of view of the mute Arab victims."
2. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times
   • content: "[A] retelling of Albert Camus's classic The Stranger from an Algerian perspective...[this] debut novel reaped glowing international reviews, literary honors, and then, suddenly, demands for [Daoud's] public execution."
3. • premium: False
   • source: NewYorker.com
   • content: "Daoud has said that his novel is an homage to Albert Camus's The Stranger, but it reads more like a rebuke...Where Camus's godless prose is coolly mathematical in its ratio of words to meaning, Daoud's work conducts waves of warmth. The sand and the sea and the sky and the stars, which, for Camus, seem to negate life rather than affirm it, are, for Daoud, vital witnesses and participants in his existence."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Economist
   • content: "[A] scorching debut novel that is sure to become an essential companion to Camus's masterpiece...The Meursault Investigation...is a biting, profound response to French colonialism. It is also a lamentation for a modern Algeria gripped by pious fundamentalism...The book's brilliance lies in the gradual way Mr. Daoud reveals Harun to be a perfect mirror: the tragic double of Meursault/Camus... Daoud's prose is propulsive and charged. The pages glitter with memorable phrases. This brave book is a vertiginous response to a century of trauma."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "[A] mesmerizing first novel...The Meursault Investigation has an inescapable topical resonance, given the role played by political Islam in Algeria in recent times...an absorbing, independent story and a shrewd critique of a country trapped in history's time warp."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "The nameless Arab victim of Albert Camus's The Stranger receives a biography and a name in this thoughtful, controversial rejoinder from the other side of the colonial question...Fiction with a strong moral edge, offering a Rashomon-like response to a classic novel."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Nuruddin Farah, award-winning author of Hiding in Plain Sight
   • content: "In The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud takes us to a territory that is clearly his own. I loved the unexpected depth to the restorative nature of the text, which enthralls the readers all the more, especially when they are familiar with Albert Camus's The Stranger. It is a wonderful novel and I enjoyed reading it."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Le Monde des livres
   • content: "A superb novel...In the future, The Stranger and The Meursault Investigation will be read side by side."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Les Echos
   • content: "Very beautiful writing, original, located between suppressed anger and bursts of elation."
10. • premium: False
    • source: La Croix
    • content: "A breathtaking and effectively realized novel. The Stranger becomes a palindrome... The Meursault Investigation approaches the incredible, in that it reverses the perspective and point of view not without an emphatic ferociousness, all while playing with the prose and perspective of The Stranger."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Le Nouvel observateur
    • content: "A remarkable homage to its model."
12. • premium: False
    • source: La Montagne

    • content: "An intense and surprising story."
13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 20, 2015
      Camus’s The Stranger is vividly reimagined in Daoud’s intensely atmospheric novel (a finalist for the Prix Goncourt), which is told in a meandering monologue by the adult Harun, over the course of several visits to a bar in Oran, Algeria. Harun’s older brother, Musa, an Algerian Arab, was shot by the Frenchman Meursault on an Algiers beach in 1942; his body was never recovered. Musa’s missing corpse casts a long shadow over Harun, “condemned to a secondary role” by his widowed mother as she drags him on an interminable investigation into the death, taking the two from the Bab-el-Oued neighborhood of Algiers to the town of Hadjout, in northern Algeria. Determined to “organize the world” through language, the teenage Harun masters French in flashback, and he is 27 by the time a chance encounter offers him an opportunity to irrevocably alter his fate. As Harun meditates on guilt, alienation, and his failed affair with Meriem, a university student, his quarrel is revealed to be not just with his mother and Meursault, but with post-Independence Algeria and God himself. Ultimately, Harun identifies more with his brother’s killer than with his own zealous countrymen. The ghostlike “double” he sees in the bar where the tale is told may be Camus himself: “I’m his Arab. Or maybe he’s mine.” Daoud resists affirming which interpretation is “truer,” and readers will be captivated by the ambiguity.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 15, 2015
      The nameless Arab victim of Albert Camus' The Stranger receives a biography and a name in this thoughtful, controversial rejoinder from the other side of the colonial question. "Musa, Musa, Musa...I like to repeat that name from time to time so it doesn't disappear." So writes Algerian novelist Daoud, whose protagonist returns Camus' favor by skirting around the name and facts of his most famous book, except to complain that Musa is destined to "remain 'the Arab' forever." Meursault, Camus' murderer, is long dead, and so, of course, is Musa. Unlike Meursault's mother, though, Musa's is alive-ancient but alive-and still trying to get recognition as the progenitor of a martyr in the cause of Algerian independence. Alas, the bureaucracy is even more indifferent than Meursault. As for the brother/narrator, he's a barroom kvetcher and keeper of grudges who, like Meursault, can barely be moved to stir-until one day, some accident of fate compels him to act, finally, and take his lumps for it. The parallels between Meursault and him are numerous, and though the mood of Daoud's slender novel, originally published in French in 2013, is more plaintive, it is also grudgingly respectful toward its predecessor: "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." It is for his sly insertions of religious questioning that Daoud has come under fire in his native country, having been the recent subject of a fatwa for venturing to suggest, in the final chapter, that the proper business of humankind is to tend to life on the mortal plane. Free-speech advocates may want to praise the author for his daring view on that matter, but this novel is praiseworthy enough as it stands. Fiction with a strong moral edge, offering a Rashomon-like response to a classic novel.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from June 1, 2015
      

      "The original guy was such a good storyteller, he managed to make people forget his crime," says the narrator bitterly at the opening of this blazing, brilliantly conceived debut novel, which earned Algerian journalist Daoud a Prix Goncourt nomination--and a fatwa. Even if you ignore the title, it takes only a moment to realize that this work revisits Albert Camus's The Stranger from the Arab perspective. The narrator, Harun, recalls the murder of his older brother, Musa, who is all but anonymous in Camus's work, and the heavy consequences as their mother turns monstrous while investigating what happened and Harun wholly embraces life's absurdity and his own violent persona. VERDICT An eye-opening, humbling read, splendid whether or not you know and love the original.

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

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A New York Times Notable Book of 2015
“A tour-de-force reimagining of Camus’s The Stranger, from the point of view of the mute Arab victims.” —The New Yorker
 
He was the brother of “the Arab” killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus’s classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling’s memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name—Musa—and describes the events that led to Musa’s casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach.
               
In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his broken heart, on his anger with men desperate for a god, and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A stranger among his own...

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