Camus on Trial

“Mama’s still alive today.” With these words Kamel Daoud begins his brilliant short novel Meursault, contre-enquête, rendered in John Cullen’s fine English translation as The Meursault Investigation. Daoud is an Algerian author writing in French, and his novel—announced in its title and very first line—is a creative reworking of Albert Camus’s classic 1942 novella L’Étranger (The Stranger). In France the novel has received prestigious literary awards. In the United States it has been reviewed in a range of prominent outlets (including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Nation, and NPR). And in Algeria, its 2013 publication by Éditions Barzakh, a secular, liberal publishing house, thrust it into the middle of a complex cultural war in which critical intellectuals find themselves caught between authoritarian regime elites and Islamist militants.