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3.48 AVERAGE
3.48 AVERAGE
just as good as I thought it was going to be, and had heard it was. No surprises.
Where is the philosophical angle that made The Stranger worth reading? Is the point simply that it's important to read a book from a decolonized perspective that actually doesn't add anything to the conversation about colonialism?
Those who read The Stranger by Albert Camus must know by heart its first word in the first sentence, that by some translators is translated in to “Mother” but by Matthew Ward is attained as its origin “Maman died today.” The sentence that describes intimacy as well as distance in the mother-son relationship, is so famous that when writing the Meursault Investigation, Daoud points out another mother-son relationship that is missed by the world: The mother of Meursault’s victim. “Mama’s still alive today.”
Because of the first sentences, somehow to me, this book is like a game that I used to play when I was a little kid, the game of finding differences and similarities in here and in the Stranger.
Passionately told by the brother of the Arab, or in this book is given a name, Musa; the struggle and despair Musa’s family has to go through after his murder. To an unmentioned gentleman, Harun – the brother, shares his pain of living. Already in his 60s, Harun grows up in the shadow of Musa. The mother, according to him is punishing him for being alive instead of her favorite son.
While at the beginning Harun protests about the unfairness the history has done to his brother – that he dies without so much of a name to be called with except merely “an Arab”, no reason is found for his murder and there is no body to be found which his family cannot give him a proper burial; slowly the conversation turns into a confession of a crime. The murder of a Frenchman by Harun in one night when the man is trying to trespass his home is at one point a similarity found in the two stories; although repeatedly mentions by Harun that (at least) he knows his victim’s name and has a solid reason for killing him.
“I killed at night, and ever since I’ve had night’s immensity for an accomplice.”
That at the end of the books, both Harun and Meursault are reading old newspapers stories, is also another similarity Daoud is trying to highlight. That the story can be seen as related to Harun’s story, it is not the strong point of his narration. As well as his addiction to alcohol that brings him to the bar almost every night.
Before 1962 Algeria was a French colony. The timing where Harun kills Joseph, the Frenchmen is taken place shortly after the declaration of its independence – that according to the colonel should have been done before July 5th, because after the independence killing is not the same as war; but Harun points out that killing is killing – His brother is killed, and not a martyr, neither is Meursault a hero in anyway. Regardless his conviction that he is going to get punished, the colonel lets Harun go at the following dawn.
“Religion is public transportation I never use,”
Daoud’s stance on religion is also what I found as very interesting. I always feel that when in a crowd, religion is not carrying its value anymore – collectively, it just legitimates acts of bullying which in the end always hurts others. Through Harun, Daoud expresses his view on religion, that almost the same as the indifference Meursault has about almost everything that disinterest him – religion is only a matter of whether or not someone is interested in following. And for Harun, he is not..
Daoud in my opinion is only borrowing the theme from Camus. That from murder of the Arab in Camus’s book, Daoud can bring up the situation that clouded Algeria until today. The years of colonialism and their stance on religion that seems to him, also as with laws, is nothing but a collective tool to right what is inherently wrong. Aside from also pointing out the feeling of alienated by their surrounding which makes both characters strangers to their own society.
Because of the first sentences, somehow to me, this book is like a game that I used to play when I was a little kid, the game of finding differences and similarities in here and in the Stranger.
Passionately told by the brother of the Arab, or in this book is given a name, Musa; the struggle and despair Musa’s family has to go through after his murder. To an unmentioned gentleman, Harun – the brother, shares his pain of living. Already in his 60s, Harun grows up in the shadow of Musa. The mother, according to him is punishing him for being alive instead of her favorite son.
While at the beginning Harun protests about the unfairness the history has done to his brother – that he dies without so much of a name to be called with except merely “an Arab”, no reason is found for his murder and there is no body to be found which his family cannot give him a proper burial; slowly the conversation turns into a confession of a crime. The murder of a Frenchman by Harun in one night when the man is trying to trespass his home is at one point a similarity found in the two stories; although repeatedly mentions by Harun that (at least) he knows his victim’s name and has a solid reason for killing him.
“I killed at night, and ever since I’ve had night’s immensity for an accomplice.”
That at the end of the books, both Harun and Meursault are reading old newspapers stories, is also another similarity Daoud is trying to highlight. That the story can be seen as related to Harun’s story, it is not the strong point of his narration. As well as his addiction to alcohol that brings him to the bar almost every night.
Before 1962 Algeria was a French colony. The timing where Harun kills Joseph, the Frenchmen is taken place shortly after the declaration of its independence – that according to the colonel should have been done before July 5th, because after the independence killing is not the same as war; but Harun points out that killing is killing – His brother is killed, and not a martyr, neither is Meursault a hero in anyway. Regardless his conviction that he is going to get punished, the colonel lets Harun go at the following dawn.
“Religion is public transportation I never use,”
Daoud’s stance on religion is also what I found as very interesting. I always feel that when in a crowd, religion is not carrying its value anymore – collectively, it just legitimates acts of bullying which in the end always hurts others. Through Harun, Daoud expresses his view on religion, that almost the same as the indifference Meursault has about almost everything that disinterest him – religion is only a matter of whether or not someone is interested in following. And for Harun, he is not..
Daoud in my opinion is only borrowing the theme from Camus. That from murder of the Arab in Camus’s book, Daoud can bring up the situation that clouded Algeria until today. The years of colonialism and their stance on religion that seems to him, also as with laws, is nothing but a collective tool to right what is inherently wrong. Aside from also pointing out the feeling of alienated by their surrounding which makes both characters strangers to their own society.
Daoud's book is, like Camus' The Stranger that preceded it, a character study of its protagonist. The similarities and differences between M. Mersault (from The Stranger) and Harun (from the present work) are explored, as well as their relationship to the world around them. Definitely worth reading, having just read The Stranger.
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
this should be required reading alongside [b:The Stranger|49552|The Stranger|Albert Camus|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349927872s/49552.jpg|3324344] in any class where it is taught.
[T]he absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled down, endlessly.¹
The curtain opening lines of Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, ‘Mama’s still alive today,’ reveal a stage set for a pastiche of reproach and rapprochement towards Albert Camus’ The Stranger² which opens with ‘Maman died today.’ The Stranger, in which Camus’ anti-hero is tried for shooting a nameless Arab on an Algerian beach, is the soil from which Meursault Investigation sprouts, in which the focal character Harun elucidates a life as the younger brother to Meursault’s victim. The story is told over drinks to in conversation with a silent interlocutor (though responses are implied through Harun’s speech), akin to the style of Camus’ [b:The Fall|11991|The Fall|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1467904855l/11991._SY75_.jpg|3324245]. Despite the bitter chastisements of Meursault, The Meursault Investigation and The Stranger become two sides of the same coin as Daoud crafts a ponderous and probing investigation into the absurdities of life and convictions, and elucidates on the history, strife and his opinions of the existential failure of the Algerian Independence.
That’s the best proof of our absurd existence, my friend: Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.
Where Camus’ left us with a body bleeding under the sun, Daoud has delivered us a life with a name and legacy. While Meursault’s pistol discharge was ‘knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness’, Harun’s retribution fires ‘two sharp raps on the door of deliverance.. Daoud creates an exciting antithesis of The Stranger, critiquing Meursault’s failure to name ‘his book’s sacrificial victim’ as a focused expression of the French’s view on Islamic people in colonialist French-occupied Algeria in the early 1900s. The Meursault Investigation exists in a unique universe where Meursault was a walking, flesh-and-blood reality, but also where The Stranger is—as in our reality—a novel studied by college students the world over. ‘It’s as important to give a dead man a name as it is to name a newborn infant,’ preaches Harun, Daoud’s own Meursault, ‘if he calls my brother ‘The Arab’ it’s so he can kill him the way one kills time, by strolling around aimlessly.’ Harun grew up ‘a child facing the immensity of both the crime and the horizon’ in a land full of Meursaults that occupied his homeland. He vents his disgust with French colonialism, but also his revulsion of his homeland’s weaknesses and failure to reach the glory promised by independence. ‘This is a city with it’s legs spread open towards the sea,³ he says, chastising Oran for spilling of French people and culture into it’s heart. The division between French and Arab trouble him (‘Arab-ness...only exists in the white man's eyes’) and he is forced into a life where one must take sides even if sides don’t really matter in the grand non-scheme of things. He watched his country destroy itself during independence, scouring the land into ruin much like their occupiers had, and exhumes antipathy for the Islamic religious movements sweeping the people into a blind furor of senseless belief.
The word Arab appears twenty-five times, but not a single name, not once.
Despite his revulsion for Meursault and all he has come to represent, Harun and his adversary are juxtaposed in a way that highlight their similarities by examining their differences. ‘I was practically the murderer’s double,’ he admits. The two share the experience of having killed a man in cold blood, one at 2pm oppressed by the sun, the other at 2am transfixed by the moon. Unlike Meursault’s victim, Harun provides his own with a name (Joseph, the name shared by the husband to Mary, the mother of Jesus in the Bible, which implicates Harun’s killing as an act of destroying God much as how Meursault’s was an expression of meaninglessness in a world with an absent God) and history, yet the effect is parallel in both. ‘When your hero is in his cell, that’s when he’s best at asking the big questions,’ points out Harun, whose cell is not made of stone but the living flesh of his own making. It is here when Harun attempts to answer the big questions and Daoud tightens the laces between what initially appeared as two dissimilar characters. Both are tried for the murder, but judged for their character and not the smiting act with Harun criticized for not joining the revolution underground—not loving his ‘motherland’ enough—and Meursault for not loving his mother enough. Daoud expresses their ‘brotherhood’, but is careful to represent them more as two sides to the same coin, both cooperative and competitive. Like brothers, the two will disagree , squabble and fight, but there is a shared blood fueling their respective hearts. The two novels practically serve as parables of the other and as the novel spirals into introspection, the lines of fiction blur and one cannot be sure what belongs to Meursault and what to Harun. Is it possible that the assertion of Meursault killing the brother is a stand-in for any Frenchman slaying the brother? Has Harun become so engrossed by The Stranger, which he admits to having read*, that he has merged the story with his own to better assess himself and his own beliefs? The closer Daoud ties the two characters, the more astounding and important the message becomes.
[R]eligion is public transportation I never use.
Harun expounds on his disillusionment with the Islamic religious beliefs, which coincide with the fall of the kingdom during the disappointment with independence, a second-coming of sorts that didn’t resurrect but merely left all in damnation. Like Meursault, Harun has an absent father (who is named and given a history unlike the never-mentioned father of Meursault, similarly to Daoud's’ treatment of both murder victims), a man who worked as a night watchman and fled his family. The absence of the father is the absence of The Father and the lack of a Watchman for all our souls.
Who could take life seriously afterwards?
Oddly enough, I read most of this novel while either sitting on a beach or in a bar. While Daoud’s version can be a bit heavy-handed and less subtle than Camus’, and also a touch metaphor-heavy (which seems to be a trait of present literature to bulk up on metaphors, beleaguering the reader with them in hopes they’ll not notice the bad ones when the book would be better served by cutting anything less than the best), The Meursault Investigation makes for a worthy companion-competitor to The Stranger. The homages to Camus’ body of work are done with impressive and tactful flair, and the two become nearly inseparable in the realm of literature. Readers that haven’t read The Stranger or are quite rusty on it needn’t worry about enjoying Daoud’s modern classic, which stands alone quite well. However, those well versed in Camus will find many subtle nods and jokes within and open a vast depth of understanding into both novels through their interrelated commentary. Having read them back-to-back was extraordinarily fulfilling, and I would recommend that as the most satisfying approach. The Meursault Investigation finds itself to be the more humanist of the two works (and one addressing Camus' blind-spots on colonialism) at hand through a brotherhood and union with Camus’ famous work from which this one springs, yet still maintains the brooding and uplifting-bleakness that makes it’s predecessor so unforgettable.
4.5/5
I think something immense, something infinite is required to balance out our human condition.
¹ An homage to Camus’ [b:The Myth of Sisyphus|25857411|The Myth of Sisyphus|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1439157558l/25857411._SX50_.jpg|48339830], one of the many ways Daoud ties his philosophical investigations to Camus’ canon beyond The Stranger.
² The Stranger is sometimes translated as The Other, which Daoud toys with in passages such as:
³ This—along with the aforementioned quote ‘accidental interruption in his life where the pronoun assumes a male dominance over plurality for an experience that is neither distinctly male or female—is bound to raise an eyebrow among the socially conscious. There is feminine imagery everywhere in the book, often disturbing such as ‘the prostitute slash Algerian land and the settler who abuses her with repeated rapes and violence’ or the depiction of the liberated Oran becoming ‘the prostitute slash Algerian land and the settler who abuses her with repeated rapes and violence.’ One shouldn’t jump to quickly to denounce the novel or novelist as a blatant misogynist, or brush it off with an awkward neutralization assumption of cultural differences but take a look through a more deconstructionist vantage-point (one must also not make the Intentional Fallacy of presuming a character’s beliefs represent those of the author). Harun grew up under the stifling closeness and control of his mother, which led to a stunted emotional and sexual maturity and a love/hate relationship with his mother (the binaries both being another method collaboration by opposing and embodying the nature of Meursault). The sexually violent and degrading imagery of women is a repressed projection of Harun’s frustration forged in the relationship with his mother. As he felt disappointed, suffocated and betrayed by his mother, so too does he with his native land and the two associate and comment upon one another in his subconscious.
* Harun insists he learned to speak French to better understand and assault his adversary, and The Meursault Investigation is originally written in French. Language becomes a brief but important theme flowing within the novel.
The curtain opening lines of Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, ‘Mama’s still alive today,’ reveal a stage set for a pastiche of reproach and rapprochement towards Albert Camus’ The Stranger² which opens with ‘Maman died today.’ The Stranger, in which Camus’ anti-hero is tried for shooting a nameless Arab on an Algerian beach, is the soil from which Meursault Investigation sprouts, in which the focal character Harun elucidates a life as the younger brother to Meursault’s victim. The story is told over drinks to in conversation with a silent interlocutor (though responses are implied through Harun’s speech), akin to the style of Camus’ [b:The Fall|11991|The Fall|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1467904855l/11991._SY75_.jpg|3324245]. Despite the bitter chastisements of Meursault, The Meursault Investigation and The Stranger become two sides of the same coin as Daoud crafts a ponderous and probing investigation into the absurdities of life and convictions, and elucidates on the history, strife and his opinions of the existential failure of the Algerian Independence.
That’s the best proof of our absurd existence, my friend: Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.
Where Camus’ left us with a body bleeding under the sun, Daoud has delivered us a life with a name and legacy. While Meursault’s pistol discharge was ‘knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness’, Harun’s retribution fires ‘two sharp raps on the door of deliverance.. Daoud creates an exciting antithesis of The Stranger, critiquing Meursault’s failure to name ‘his book’s sacrificial victim’ as a focused expression of the French’s view on Islamic people in colonialist French-occupied Algeria in the early 1900s. The Meursault Investigation exists in a unique universe where Meursault was a walking, flesh-and-blood reality, but also where The Stranger is—as in our reality—a novel studied by college students the world over. ‘It’s as important to give a dead man a name as it is to name a newborn infant,’ preaches Harun, Daoud’s own Meursault, ‘if he calls my brother ‘The Arab’ it’s so he can kill him the way one kills time, by strolling around aimlessly.’ Harun grew up ‘
The word Arab appears twenty-five times, but not a single name, not once.
Despite his revulsion for Meursault and all he has come to represent, Harun and his adversary are juxtaposed in a way that highlight their similarities by examining their differences. ‘I was practically the murderer’s double,’ he admits. The two share the experience of having killed a man in cold blood, one at 2pm oppressed by the sun, the other at 2am transfixed by the moon. Unlike Meursault’s victim, Harun provides his own with a name (Joseph, the name shared by the husband to Mary, the mother of Jesus in the Bible, which implicates Harun’s killing as an act of destroying God much as how Meursault’s was an expression of meaninglessness in a world with an absent God) and history, yet the effect is parallel in both. ‘When your hero is in his cell, that’s when he’s best at asking the big questions,’ points out Harun, whose cell is not made of stone but the living flesh of his own making. It is here when Harun attempts to answer the big questions and Daoud tightens the laces between what initially appeared as two dissimilar characters. Both are tried for the murder, but judged for their character and not the smiting act with Harun criticized for not joining the revolution underground—not loving his ‘motherland’ enough—and Meursault for not loving his mother enough. Daoud expresses their ‘brotherhood’, but is careful to represent them more as two sides to the same coin, both cooperative and competitive. Like brothers, the two will disagree , squabble and fight, but there is a shared blood fueling their respective hearts. The two novels practically serve as parables of the other and as the novel spirals into introspection, the lines of fiction blur and one cannot be sure what belongs to Meursault and what to Harun. Is it possible that the assertion of Meursault killing the brother is a stand-in for any Frenchman slaying the brother? Has Harun become so engrossed by The Stranger, which he admits to having read*, that he has merged the story with his own to better assess himself and his own beliefs? The closer Daoud ties the two characters, the more astounding and important the message becomes.
[R]eligion is public transportation I never use.
Harun expounds on his disillusionment with the Islamic religious beliefs, which coincide with the fall of the kingdom during the disappointment with independence, a second-coming of sorts that didn’t resurrect but merely left all in damnation. Like Meursault, Harun has an absent father (who is named and given a history unlike the never-mentioned father of Meursault, similarly to Daoud's’ treatment of both murder victims), a man who worked as a night watchman and fled his family. The absence of the father is the absence of The Father and the lack of a Watchman for all our souls.
...I feel like...yelling at him to quit sniveling prayers, accept the world, open his eyes to his own strength, his own dignity, and stop running after a father who has absconded to heaven and is never coming back.The two anti-heroes accept a world without a chiseled moral code to provide meaning and Harun believes that the acceptance and cultivation of self-hood and a push for equal human justice from oppression is enough to assuage the void left by God’s nonexistence.
These people need something bigger as a counterweight to the abyss….and I think it’ll lead us all to premature death, or to someplace on the edges of the earth where we can topple over into the void.Daoud’s depictions of the failures of Islamic belief, the meaninglessness in a world with an absent God, a world where ‘I alone pay the electric bill, I alone will be eaten by worms in the end’, has spawned some harsh criticism, such as a Facebook issued Fatwa by an Algerian imam and proclamations that he should be publically executed for his novel-expressed beliefs (read the article here while pondering the irony of condemning an author to death for commenting on a book in which the narrator is put to death for his own beliefs that God is a myth and life is absurd).
Who could take life seriously afterwards?
Oddly enough, I read most of this novel while either sitting on a beach or in a bar. While Daoud’s version can be a bit heavy-handed and less subtle than Camus’, and also a touch metaphor-heavy (which seems to be a trait of present literature to bulk up on metaphors, beleaguering the reader with them in hopes they’ll not notice the bad ones when the book would be better served by cutting anything less than the best), The Meursault Investigation makes for a worthy companion-competitor to The Stranger. The homages to Camus’ body of work are done with impressive and tactful flair, and the two become nearly inseparable in the realm of literature. Readers that haven’t read The Stranger or are quite rusty on it needn’t worry about enjoying Daoud’s modern classic, which stands alone quite well. However, those well versed in Camus will find many subtle nods and jokes within and open a vast depth of understanding into both novels through their interrelated commentary. Having read them back-to-back was extraordinarily fulfilling, and I would recommend that as the most satisfying approach. The Meursault Investigation finds itself to be the more humanist of the two works (and one addressing Camus' blind-spots on colonialism) at hand through a brotherhood and union with Camus’ famous work from which this one springs, yet still maintains the brooding and uplifting-bleakness that makes it’s predecessor so unforgettable.
4.5/5
I think something immense, something infinite is required to balance out our human condition.
¹ An homage to Camus’ [b:The Myth of Sisyphus|25857411|The Myth of Sisyphus|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1439157558l/25857411._SX50_.jpg|48339830], one of the many ways Daoud ties his philosophical investigations to Camus’ canon beyond The Stranger.
² The Stranger is sometimes translated as The Other, which Daoud toys with in passages such as:
After I killed a man, it wasn’t my innocence I missed most, it was the border that had existed until then between my life and the crime...The Other is a unit of measurement you lose when you kill.The playfulness of the line is also it’s ingenuity; ‘The Other’ (note the capitalization) implies this border beyond oneself Harun bemoans the loss of, but also uses the emotional, moral and philosophical implications within Camus’s novel as a coined yardstick for existential (though Camus rejected the label of ‘existentialist’). The assertion of acknowledgement of connotation in the latter interpretation is comical as an ‘inside joke’ of sorts with readers deeply familiar with Camus’ novel and assumes the reader (who is an isn’t the student carrying around The Stranger in their backpack with whom Harun is conversing/dictating) already considers the weight of The Stranger as a measuring point in emotional and existential health.
³ This—along with the aforementioned quote ‘accidental interruption in his life where the pronoun assumes a male dominance over plurality for an experience that is neither distinctly male or female—is bound to raise an eyebrow among the socially conscious. There is feminine imagery everywhere in the book, often disturbing such as ‘the prostitute slash Algerian land and the settler who abuses her with repeated rapes and violence’ or the depiction of the liberated Oran becoming ‘the prostitute slash Algerian land and the settler who abuses her with repeated rapes and violence.’ One shouldn’t jump to quickly to denounce the novel or novelist as a blatant misogynist, or brush it off with an awkward neutralization assumption of cultural differences but take a look through a more deconstructionist vantage-point (one must also not make the Intentional Fallacy of presuming a character’s beliefs represent those of the author). Harun grew up under the stifling closeness and control of his mother, which led to a stunted emotional and sexual maturity and a love/hate relationship with his mother (the binaries both being another method collaboration by opposing and embodying the nature of Meursault). The sexually violent and degrading imagery of women is a repressed projection of Harun’s frustration forged in the relationship with his mother. As he felt disappointed, suffocated and betrayed by his mother, so too does he with his native land and the two associate and comment upon one another in his subconscious.
* Harun insists he learned to speak French to better understand and assault his adversary, and The Meursault Investigation is originally written in French. Language becomes a brief but important theme flowing within the novel.
I know your hero’s genius: the ability to tear open the common, everyday language and emerge on the other side, where a more devastating language is waiting to narrate the world in another way
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated