The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“The Meursault Investigation takes place in the same world as Albert Camus’s The Stranger, and tells those events from the perspective of the younger brother of the unnamed Arab murdered by Meursault, who published The Stranger upon his release from prison. In its frame story, the reader takes the role of a voiceless college student who interviews Harun, the brother of Meursault’s “unnamed Arab.” The novel gives the “unnamed Arab” his name — Musa — and provides a unique anticolonial Algerian viewpoint on the philosophical side of Camus’s work through the jaded, unreliable narrator’s picaresque experiences as a fence-sitter during the Algerian Revolution.

The Meursault Investigation is a novel I enjoyed much more in concept than execution. My main issue with it was that its attempts to juxtapose Meursault and Harun were too heavy-handed, with Harun’s narrative having blatant parallels to nearly every major scene in Camus’s novel (with varying levels of success). This became especially noticeable pacing-wise in the second half of the book, into which most of Harun’s plot is crammed; I nearly rolled my eyes when I realized that Meriem, Harun’s love interest, was meant to be a foil to Marie Cardona. It was almost too obvious.

Despite this gripe, the book held my attention throughout its relatively short 191 page duration. Two interesting insights into The Stranger struck me in particular: first, regarding the absurdity of ‘just’ violence and the ethics of liberatory war in Harun’s interrogation; and second, a passage in which Harun praises The Stranger despite his hatred of Meursault because its economy of language allowed it to convey the last words of a person close to death. I also greatly enjoyed the attention devoted to Harun and Musa’s mother, who was a deeply complex character and a highlight in a way her counterpart in The Stranger was not.

If you haven’t read it already, I recommend considering this book after you’ve read The Stranger (perhaps in your first semester of AP Literature), just because it’s refreshing to read such a different take on it. Though it has problems, it’s a thought-provoking supplement that relevantly excoriates the blind spots of Camus’s contribution to the Western canon.”

View all my reviews