The Meursault Investigation by Kamel DaoudMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Having spent a couple of days mulling over why in the world this book was called a "tour de force", I think I can appreciate it better. However, upon reading it as soon as I finished The Stranger, with its elegant clipped sentences, and straightforward polished story line, I felt like I was inside a rock tumbler as I read this reiteration. The "Arab's" brother is on a rant, drinking illegal wine in Algeria, as he tries to tell his side of the story. It rambles and whines and digresses, in opposition, I suppose of Camus. It is an oral story rather than a book. While Meursault seems untouched by things like death, guilt, expectation, the Arabs brother is consumed by them. Yet he shares with Meursault some unexpected similarities...a shooting that is meaningless and neither feels responsible for, a distance from civilized sanctioned belief systems such as God and patriotism. So it is interesting to compare and contrast the two stories. Without that aspect, I don't think I would have enjoyed the book at all, though. For a book called the Meursault Investigation, there is really no new information about anybody or anything in The Stranger, and maybe that was the point, but I went in thinking we would get "the other side" of the story. Also, perhaps if I understood the history of Algiers and France better, a and apparently Camus reception there, I might.have gotten more out of it, but I wasn't moved to research it.
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why the court preferred judging a man who didn’t weep over his mother’s death to judging a man who killed an Arab.
He describes the world as if he’s going to die at any moment, as if he has to choose his words with an economy of breathing. He’s an ascetic.
Didn’t they see they were disqualifying my act, obliterating it, by treating it like that?
The gratuitousness of Musa’s death was unconscionable. And now my revenge had just been struck down to the same level of insignificance!
It pained my heart to be only her shadow and not her reflection
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