{"id":303966,"date":"2016-04-06T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-06T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2016\/04\/06\/the-meursault-investigation-by-kamel-daoud-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T14:54:35","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:54:35","slug":"the-meursault-investigation-by-kamel-daoud-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2016\/04\/06\/the-meursault-investigation-by-kamel-daoud-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Meursault Investigation” by Kamel Daoud [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series, is by Gwen Dawson, founder of Literary License.<\/a> We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Meursault Investigation<\/em><\/a> by Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen (Algeria, Other Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

This year\u2019s longlist is very strong, but I have no problem making the claim that The Meursault Investigation<\/em> by Kamel Daoud deserves to be at the head of the list. No other book on this longlist will force you to reexamine your reading of one of the Western world\u2019s most studied novels like Daoud\u2019s novel will. On top of that, this novel will expose your unconscious reading bias and, if you\u2019re like me, make you feel pretty guilty in the process. If I were an English professor, The Meursault Investigation<\/em> would go on my syllabus next semester.<\/p>\n

In this novel, Daoud takes on Albert Camus\u2019s The Stranger<\/em> (sometimes translated as The Other<\/em> or The Outsider<\/em>) and dares to tell the other side of the story. For those few of you who escaped having The Stranger<\/em> as assigned reading in school, it is widely regarded as the classic existential (or, some say, absurdist) novel. Camus wrote it in French and first published it in 1942. To summarize, in the first half of the novel, the protagonist Meursault ends up shooting an \u201cArab\u201d on a hot sunny beach out of either boredom\/ennui or heatstroke (the critics disagree) and, in the second half, he languishes in his jail cell waiting for death while questioning the meaning of life. Meursault eventually concludes, \u201cNothing, nothing mattered . . .\u201d The story is told in the first person in unadorned, almost acetic, prose.<\/p>\n

Daoud comes at this same story from a different angle. His protagonist Harun is the surviving brother of Musa, the \u201cArab\u201d murdered by Meursault in Camus\u2019s novel. In Harun\u2019s world, The Stranger<\/em> is a kind of memoir by Meursault, describing his crime and its aftermath. The Meursault Investigation is Harun\u2019s first-person response to Meursault\u2019s narrative, albeit fifty years after the crime. For Harun, Meursault murders Musa first by calling him what he is not (Arab), second, by refusing to call him what he is (Musa), and third, by shooting him five times. All three are inexcusable, and as readers of The Stranger<\/em>, most of us were complicit in the first two murders, only recognizing the five bullets as wrong.<\/p>\n

Unlike many readers of The Stranger<\/em>, Harun refuses to accept the label of \u201cArab\u201d for his brother:<\/p>\n

Arab. I never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man\u2019s eyes. In our neighborhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces, and habits. Period. The others were \u201cthe strangers,\u201d the roumis God brought here to put us to the test . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Meursault also neglects to give Musa a name or even a body. Without a body, there\u2019s \u201ca weird funeral\u201d and an \u201cempty grave,\u201d and, understandably, Harun is angry about this:<\/p>\n

Just think, we\u2019re talking about one of the most-read books in the world. My brother might have been famous if your author had merely deigned to give him a name. H\u2019med or Kaddour or Hammou, just a name, damn it! . . . But no, he didn\u2019t name him, because if he had, my brother would have caused the murderer a problem with his conscience: You can\u2019t easily kill a man when he has a given name.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

The brilliance of Daoud\u2019s work here is that many of his readers will be recognizing these gaps in the classic story for the first time. When I read The Stranger<\/em> in ninth grade (I think), all of the focus was on Meursault\u2019s motivations in shooting \u201cthe Arab\u201d and his resulting struggle to define the meaning of his life. I don\u2019t recall thinking much about the Arab whose death animates Meursault\u2019s famous philosophizing. This is where the guilt comes in. Why didn\u2019t we think about the murdered man and his family when we read The Stranger<\/em>? And when we didn\u2019t, why weren\u2019t we taught that we should?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have space here to unpack all the masterful ways in which Daoud engages with Camus\u2019s novel except to say that the resonances are multilayered and reward close reading. One point of contrast, however, is notable. Both novels were written originally in French, but where Camus writes with spare efficiency, Daoud employs a lush, descriptive language. John Cullen\u2019s translation of Daoud captures the warmth and sensuousness of the language as well as Harun\u2019s conversational tone. The stark difference in linguistic style between the novels highlights the different worlds inhabited by these two protagonists, even though they walk on the same streets.<\/p>\n

The Meursault Investigation<\/em> is uncomfortably thought-provoking in the best way. It deserves to be read and studied alongside its classic companion. Even with only a passing familiarity with Camus\u2019s The Stranger<\/em>, Daoud\u2019s novel is a rewarding read. The Meursault Investigation<\/em>\u2019s brilliance, however, becomes most obvious when read right after reading (or rereading) Camus\u2019s classic. It is then that its complex interactions with the classic are best appreciated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Gwen Dawson, founder of Literary License. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.   The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen (Algeria, Other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[18416,35996,61536,48766,33906,61406,1906,64176,37876],"class_list":["post-303966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-best-translated-book-award","tag-btba","tag-btba-2016","tag-btba-fiction","tag-john-cullen","tag-kamel-daoud","tag-other-press","tag-the-meursault-investigation","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303966"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397102,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303966\/revisions\/397102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}