Strangers in a strange land

"Just think, we're 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… But no, he didn't name him, because if he had, my brother would have caused the murderer a problem with his conscience: You can't easily kill a man when he has a given name."

Seventy years after the publication of "The Stranger," Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud revisits Meursault, the absurd anti-hero of Albert Camus's emblematic novel. Meursault, "a Frenchman who just didn't know what to do with his day and with the rest of the world, which he carried on his back," shoots and kills an Arab man lying on a beach as he is dazzled by the blazing midday sun. In his book, "The Meursault Investigation" (Patakis, translated by Giannis Stringos), which was recently published in Greek, Daoud grapples with what he considers an...