And he's given the dignity of a personality as well - he's a strong young man with a taste for women.

He's given the dignity of a name - Musa - after simply being called 'the Arab,' a word used 25 times in The Stranger. It becomes a form of restitution.įor starters, Meursault's victim is spared the indignity of being a mere prop in his own murder. Now an old man in present-day Algeria, Harun offers a version of events that anchors this murder in history, not cosmic philosophy. It's narrated by Harun, the brother of Meursault's victim, who was 7 when his older brother was shot down. Meursault's motiveless crime and the irrational reasons for his conviction made Camus' novel a classic expression of existentialist notions about the individual's confrontation with an absurd universe.ĭaoud's book stands Camus on his head. Kamel Daoud is an Algerian journalist based in Oran. Not for shooting an innocent Arab, mind you - the French routinely got away with that in their colonies - but because the DA basically prosecutes him for not properly loving or mourning his mother. Not long after, he goes to the beach, and for reasons even he can't explain, winds up shooting a young man he calls the 'Arab.' Meursault is convicted of murder. You may recall that The Stranger is narrated by a French Algerian named Meursault, who begins the book by halfheartedly attending his mother's funeral. This tour de force forever changes the way you see Camus' novel. In his first novel, The Meursault Investigation, he reworks a text that almost everybody has to study in school: The Stranger by Albert Camus, himself born and raised in colonial Algeria. The best of these works reveal truths hidden in the original books and give voice to those kept silent.įew writers have done this so skillfully as the Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud. But over the past half century, actual fiction writers have enjoyed lifting characters from famous books and fleshing out their lives - you know, Jean Rhys telling the back story of Rochester's mad wife from Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea, or Tom Stoppard making bleak comedy out of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet. You shouldn't speculate about how many children Lady Macbeth had or what job Holden Caulfield wound up doing as a grown-up.

How?īack in college English, I was taught that it was foolish to think that fictional characters have any reality beyond the page. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Meursault Investigation Author Kamel Daoud

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