'The Meursault Investigation' by Kamel Daoud

'The Meursault Investigation' by Kamel Daoud (Other Press, 143 pages, $14.95)

Kamel Daoud's blistering "The Meursault Investigation" is based on an ingenious conceit: Its narrator, Harun, says he is the brother of the Arab shot dead at the beginning of Albert Camus' classic 1942 novel "The Stranger." Drinking with his unnamed interlocutor in a bar in the Algerian coastal town of Oran, Harun describes events leading to the death of his brother (given the name "Musa") and his life after Musa's death. The killer Meursault became a hero of mid-20th century existentialist literature, never tried for the murder but condemned after failing to cry at his mother's funeral. The Arab he killed remained unnamed and forgotten, while Algeria was merely a convenient backdrop for an absurdist drama. 

"The Meursault Investigation" is a stinging reexamination of Camus' great work. It is based on the idea that "The Stranger" was written by Meursault himself (which requires an imaginative leap, as in Camus' book the narrator is sentenced to die at the end). "The original guy was such a good storyteller, he managed to make people forget his crime," says Harun, "whereas the other one was a poor illiterate God created apparently for the sole purpose of taking a bullet and returning to dust - an anonymous person who didn't even have the time to be given a name ? My poor brother had no say." The story we're talking about, he says, "should be rewritten, in the same language, but from right to left." 

This premise makes "The Meursault Investigation" sound like a straightforward example of postcolonial "writing back." But what gives it such punch is the way it enhances the original text, helping us to see it with new eyes. Daoud has been hammered for his embarrassing...