The Meursault investigation
By: Kamel Daoud ; translated from the French by John Cullen
Contributors: Cullen, John, 1942- translator
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 143
ISBN-13: 9781590517512
Subjects: Arabs; Fiction
Work titles: Meursault, contre-enquête
Description: This response to Camus's The Stranger is at once a love story and a political manifesto about post-colonial Algeria, Islam, and the irrelevance of Arab lives. He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus's classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name--Musa--and describes the events that led to Musa's casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach. Harun is an old man tormented by frustration. In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his anger with men desperate for a god, and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A stranger among his own people, he wants to be granted, finally, the right to die.
Notes: "Originally published in French as Meursault, contre-enquête by Éditions Barzakh in Algeria in 2013, and by Actes Sud in France in 2014" -- Verso title page.