The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (review)

The Meursault Investigation (a translation of Meursault, contre-enquête), for which Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud garnered the Goncourt First Novel Prize, gives voice to Harun, the younger brother of “the Arab” killed by Albert Camus’s absurd hero in The Stranger (1942). Harun, absent from The Stranger, stresses that his brother is no more present in that book which brought admiration to the wrong martyr. According to Harun’s rendition, the famous book is called The Other and was written by Meursault himself. It obsesses the narrator and becomes inseparable not only from his own investigation of the murder, but also from his perceptions of colonized and independent Algeria.

Reminiscent of the confession in Camus’s The Fall (1956), seventy years after the murder, an embittered Harun tells his story to an unnamed interlocutor in a bar in Oran. The brother, however, is named from the start, and Harun repeats his name in an attempt to fill an insatiable gap left by the author-killer. Scholars have proposed several possibilities for the meaning of “Meursault,” but Daoud chose direct and rich symbolism for each name. Harun and his brother Musa are Aaron and Moses of the Hebrew Bible and the Koran. Although Harun is the younger brother here, he still serves as Musa’s mouthpiece. In this novel marked by orality, Harun tells a “ghost story,” and the reader learns that doubles and specters occupy Harun’s life and dreams. Much like God who, Harun believes, abandoned his creation, the earthly father figure disappeared in the narrator’s early childhood. Deceased Musa returns only to die again with every reading of The Other. As for the mother, we learn in the incipit that “Mama’s still alive today” (a play on Camus’s famous “Maman died today”). However, this eternal mourner compels Harun to carry his brother’s invisible but heavy corpse until justice—or restitution—is accomplished.

On two overlapping levels, this novel denounces and rectifies the violent omissions of the 1942 account, and at the same time uses Camus’s version of events as a launch pad, conserving the heart of its philosophy. On the first level, Daoud’s novel gives a name to the Arab and demonstrates how this famous fictional murder reflects a reality of Algeria’s colonial past, as proposed by Edward Said’s analysis in Culture and Imperialism (1993). After his death, no trace of Musa could be found: not his body, not his name, not even footsteps, quickly erased in the sand. Daoud clearly shows that Arabs are also erased while still alive, and are defined only by the gaze of the colonialist Other, who seizes and names the land but denies an identity to an individual, named simply “the Arab” twenty-five times throughout Camus’s novel. Suitable to an oral story, Daoud resists a linear narrative. Instead of resorting to a series of flashbacks, the author masterfully structures Harun’s monologue to resurrect decade-old events and repeatedly return to them, filling in more gaps. This repetition in the structure reflects the narrator’s obsession with a murder that stripped his brother of his entire existence. To further illustrate this maddening obsession, Daoud adapts the image of Sisyphus from Camus’s absurd cycle: “The absurdity of my condition . . . consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly.” Harun apologizes to his interlocutor numerous times for his “rambling” and lack of order in his story. Yet the reader should not take this as an apology from the author, whose style willfully and rightfully breaks from Camus’s linear narrative and his “austere precision.” Daoud’s style here reveals itself to be often lyrical, as we find only occasionally in The Stranger.

On a second level, Daoud appropriates Camus’s philosophical novel to show that the erasing of identity was not confined to the past, and that the colonizer is not the only one to mute individuals. Harun’s...