An Algerian Rebuke to “The Stranger”

posted on: Mar 15, 2015

There were two who died. Yes, two,” Kamel Daoud writes in his meditative first novel, “Meursault, Counter Investigation.” “The first knew how to tell a story, to the point where everyone forgot about his crime, whereas the second was a poor illiterate whom God created only, it seems, to receive a bullet and return to dust, an unknown without the time even for a name.” Daoud has said that his novel is an homage to Albert Camus’s “The Stranger,” but it reads more like a rebuke. Camus’s French-Algerian hero, sentenced to execution for the murder of an Arab, descends into a bloodless interrogation of life in the face of death. In “Meursault,” Daoud imagines a brother, Haroun, for Camus’s nameless Arab, who recounts the grief that he and his mother suffered after the murder, as the world was entranced by the intellectual calisthenics of the criminal. Haroun’s quest for justice over the next twenty years is really a tale of the Algerian struggle for independence. When at last he takes his vengeance, it is July 1962, the eve of liberation. But independence, and the exchange of power that comes with it, hardly settles everything; the violence of colonialism, followed by the vacuum of withdrawal, pushed the young nation into years of civil war. “It was your hero who killed,” Haroun says to a French companion, “but it is I who am condemned to wander.”

Source: www.newyorker.com