"A man who knows how to write kills an Arab who, on the day he dies, doesn't even have a name, as if he'd hung it on a nail somewhere before stepping onto the stage." To Harun, Meursault's biggest crime isn't the murder per se, but the way Meursault's story depersonalizes his brother:
"I know the book by heart, I can recite it to you like the Quran," he says. Harun talks about the text of "The Stranger" as though the book were written by Meursault himself. Harun, the narrator of "The Meursault Investigation," claims that the dead man was Musa, his older brother. In "The Stranger" Meursault, a young French Algerian man shoots and kills an Arab man on the beach. To approximate the affect of Daoud's novel, imagine a retelling of "To Kill a Mockingbird" in the voice of Tom Robinson's brother - with acid commentary on the quality of justice available in Maycomb. Like the late Nobel laureate Camus, Daoud is an important voice in the world of Algerian writing, but an independent one who annoys hardliners and the orthodox. Kamel Daoud's "The Meursault Investigation" turns Albert Camus' novel "The Stranger" inside out in a provocative, exciting and occasionally irritating way.
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