The Stranger by Albert Camus is an old friend from college days for many of us. If we didn’t read it while we were learning about Existentialism, we read it in French class….and wondered if the reason we didn’t understand why Meursault murdered the Arab was because we weren’t translating correctly.  This discussion will give us all a second chance at it.

The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud picks up Camus’s story 70 years after the murder. The narrator is Harun, the younger brother of the slain Arab, and he invents both a name (Musa) and a story to go with the murder.  The book is a meditation on Arab identity and the disastrous effect of colonialism in Algeria.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times Magazine wrote, “[A] stunning debut novel…[A]n intricately layered tale that not only makes us reassess Camus’s novel but also nudges us into a contemplation of Algeria’s history and current religious politics; colonialism and postcolonialism; and the ways in which language and perspective can radically alter a seemingly simple story and the social and philosophical shadows it casts backward and forward.” You can read the whole review here.

For an interesting alternative to Western perspectives on the novel, you might enjoy reading the review of The Meursault Investigation written for the New York Times  by Laila Lalami, who first read The Stranger while a sophomore in French class in Morocco.

I tried to find a YouTube interview with Daoud. There were several, but none in English. NPR, however, interviewed him with a translator close at hand. You can listen to it with the audio player below or go to the NPR website (it has pictures).

The New York Review of Books published an excellent article about The Meusault Investigation last August, but online access to it is available only to subscribers.  So, feeling an acute sense of the absurdity of this life, I stole the article and reproduce it here.