No Life Without Books

(The Meursault Investigation -in English Translation, Other Press, 2015 - Kamel Daoud, Translated by John Cullen)

In 1946, when Albert Camus published The Stranger, his thin and devastating novel about a French Algerian Pied Noir who murders an Algerian Arab on a beach, it launched half a century of debate and speculation. Was it an indictment of French colonialism? An excessively even-handed look inside the mind of a casual killer? A cynical pronouncement on human morality? Sixty-seven years later, Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud published The Meursault Investigation, a story told from the point of view of the murdered man’s brother. While Doud’s novel is no longer quite new, the questions it raises are as urgent as the day it was published in 2015.

It turns out that the only way to fully absorb Daoud’s book is to read it back-to-back with Camus’s. It doesn’t matter if you read The Stranger years ago. Read it again. It’s short. Ideally, one should keep the two novels side by side, close the book on the last page of The Stranger with one hand, then pick up Daoud with the other and continue reading. The stories are connected in ways both subtle and brilliant that will be missed if too much time elapses between reading each. The Stranger is narrated in first person by a man named Meursault who returns from overseas to a home for which he admits he feels nothing, attends his mother’s funeral tearlessly, then kills without remorse, ending up on trial for his life. Through it all, this narrator’s pulse never seems to go above 60, even as he describes murdering a man who remains strangely nameless and out of focus. Daoud’s novel, in contrast, is an emotional upheaval, a backward journey through violence, pain and loss, as if Daoud were watering the plains of Camus’s parched, alien landscape with the living blood of a present people.

Harun, Daoud’s aging protagonist, leads the reader down the deserted allies and sun-baked streets of an Algerian city haunted by an unsettled and bloody past. Where The Stranger begins with a declaration of death; “Maman died today,” Daoud’s first line insists not just on life, but on memory. “Mama’s still alive today;” and so are the undead memories her and Harun’s minds, even though he’d sometimes like to drink them away. He spends his days in one of the few bars left in the city of Oran (where Camus set The Plague) and drops hints to the reader that one of the waiters might be a ghost, though by the end of the novel, one begins to wonder if the real ghost might not be Harun himself.

Like any good barroom storyteller, Harun skips around, dredging up details and anecdotes outside the sequence of time. Conversing with, and sometimes challenging his drinking partner, the reader, he spins a narrative that comes together from more than one angle at once, like a puzzle. Sometimes he flies into rages, as if his brother’s murder were only yesterday. He demands to know why only one of those two men who met on the beach that day is given a face in Camus’s book. He asserts, “Well, the original guy was such a good story teller, he managed to make people forget his crime, whereas the other one was a poor illiterate that 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.”

Daoud gives him one – Musa. And as Musa’s story unfolds, the layers of Algeria’s history are peeled back to that moment on a beach, in the white-hot north African sun, when a French colonist put a three bullets into Harun’s brother as he sat in the sand. It is the moment that Harun cannot reconcile, and it seems fitting that he wasn’t there to see it happen. And because he was offstage, like an audience member viewing a Greek tragedy, he’s had to piece his brother’s death together from long-yellowed news clippings and court records. He keeps the reader in the bar by buying him drinks, his voice swaying from bitter irony to humble gratitude that at last someone is listening to his tale.

Harun tells of his childhood, following his mother around a French neighborhood as she banged on doors searching for Meursault’s family. Mistakenly believing an elderly French woman to be related to the murderer, she screams in her face, terrifying her. She then drags Harun behind her to the beach where her Musa died and cries out to God on the hot sand.

In Daoud’s world, Camus’s murder scene on the beach both takes on new dimensions and leaves us in a deeper pit of unanswered questions. Daoud puts flesh on the bones of the colonized Algerians that Camus kept at an aesthetic distance, a literary style that earned him accusations of Orientalism and Eurocentrism from historians and cultural critics like Edward Said and Samir Amin. Rather than taking on Camus in a polemic, however, Daoud turns to his country’s past, unearths the dead and gives voice to the living, allowing them to confront Meursault in their own voices. The resulting effect is an unleashed chorus of pain, mouths suddenly ungagged. But despite the anger with which the Harun demands to know why Meursault gets all the attention, the title of Daoud’s book pretty much gives away the answer (after all, it’s not called The Musa Investigation.) In the end, Harun himself cannot escape the long shadow of that murdering Pied Noir, repulsive for his lack of humanity, yet somehow an irresistible enigma to readers. “That story,” he says, “a corpse wrote it, not a writer. You can tell by the way he suffers from the sun and gets dazzled by colors and has no opinion on anything except the sun, the sea, and the surrounding rocks…. You know, his crime is majestically nonchalant.” Harun would love nothing better than to stop thinking about Muersault, but he simply can’t.

Something I didn’t expect happened to me in the middle of reading Daoud’s novel.
While idly channel-surfing, I caught part of a TV documentary showing an interview with Jeffrey Dahmer. It had been more that fifteen years since I’d seen any footage of this particular serial killer. It brought back a flood of memories. I grew up in Wisconsin – Dahmer country. He did most of his butchery in Milwaukee.

The journalist was asking him why he’d done it. What possessed him to lure 17 young men to his home to murder and dismember them? Dahmer’s flat affect, his polite, emotionless way of speaking, his matter-of-fact, unadorned description of killing as if it were as mundane as making a purchase from a vending machine was as repellent as it was mesmerizing.

But worse, with his upper Midwest accent he sounded just like every guy I grew up with. And how come I never noticed before how much he looked like one of my cousins? It was as if I needed fifteen years of distance to see how close to me this monster was. He swam up through the same bland, blonde, German, gene pool as I did. Only a few years older than me, he could have easily been someone my brother went to school with. I shut the TV off, but all I did was pace around my apartment, unable to get that voice out of my mind. “I don’t know why I did it. I wish I knew.”

When The Stranger first came out, people could not stop talking about Meursault. Who was he? What motivated him? Didn’t people also try to dissect Dahmer, from that first night the police in Hazmat suits rolled those hideous plastic barrels out of his apartment under the lights of TV cameras? Weren’t his victims just as invisible and nameless as Meursault’s Arab on the beach?

Dahmer followed the typical pattern of a predatory killer, hunting in a range close to where he lived. His victims were male, gay, and overwhelmingly youth of color – African American and Southeast Asian, mostly. And for the Milwaukee police in the late 80’s and early 90’s, the disappearance of people like this was simply not a policing priority. No surprise, then, that Dahmer was able to get away with it for eleven years without getting caught. Everybody from my generation knows Dahmer’s name. But I have yet to meet one who knows the name of any of those seventeen young men. They remain every bit as invisible as Meursault’s victim.

One thing that sets Dahmer apart is that he knew he wasn’t right in the head (belying conventional belief that truly insane people don’t know they’re insane.) Meursault, on the other hand, insists, “I was exactly like everybody else.” In The Stranger, when he’s questioned at trial as to why he showed no emotion at his mother’s funeral, he replies, “everybody at one time or another has wished for the death of their loved ones.” When the prosecutor directs the jury to observe his lack of remorse, Meursault reflects, “I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything.”

Obviously, Meursault is not Dahmer. There’s a big difference between killing seventeen and killing one. Between killing for sexual pleasure and killing for no reason at all.

Isn’t there?

And what if Meursault is right? What if he really is just like everybody else?

Daoud takes Harun, and the reader, to a place where we must confront that very question. Everything in the book makes us feel it is necessary that we be brought there, just as his mother brought him to that blazing, desolate beach where his brother lost his life.
Most of us remember the photo of another famous death on a beach, the 2015 photo the Syrian refugee child washed up on Turkish shores. A study by the National Academy of Sciences reported that donations to refugee relief agencies increased 55-fold in the weeks after that horrific photo was published. However, the effect was short-lived. After six weeks, the increase was only double, and two years later, entered into a steady decline, which is now being attributed to what we call “compassion fatigue,” a numbing of our ability to be aroused by the suffering of others. Daoud would have us ask ourselves if we’ll notice the day when we entirely lose our ability to feel. When sun might as well be shade, life might as well be death, and the sea melts like lead into an undistinguished, blazing horizon.

In The Stranger, Camus ultimately makes the point that it is not immorality that is the opposite of morality, but amorality. The true evil is not malice, but apathy - not caring. Largely through this little novel, Camus achieved a place among the 20th century’s most influential humanist thinkers. In taking on The Stranger, Daoud asks whether the facelessness of the powerless might not make that amorality a little easier.

But this is no moral tract. Daoud’s is a voice of the generation of Algerians who were born during the first days of independence and lived through the horrific civil war of the 1990’s, when the nullification of an election won by the Islamic Salvation Front resulted in a bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in indiscriminate door-to-door massacres. Many of the same revolutionaries who decried the inhumanity of the French were quick to call for the heads of Islamists in this horrific political bloodletting. Harun’s story is dislocated in time and seems to take place before all this, but a tuned ear can catch the origin of the bitterness, the tone of earned humility in his voice. Harun kept himself out of the revolution that threw the French out of Algeria. He could not join the militants and risk leaving his mother with no living sons left – it would have killed her. But eventually, he exacts revenge on stranger, a fleeing Frenchman. With an irony Voltaire would have appreciated, he gets into trouble with the Algerian authorities, not for the killing itself, because its timing, two weeks after the fall of the French colonial government. “The gratuitiousness of Musa’s death was unconscionable. And now my revenge had been struck down to the same level of insignificance!”

In the long wake of revolutionary dreams deferred, Daoud takes his story beyond the dichotomy of colonizer and colonized, just as Camus takes his story beyond the dichotomy of sin and salvation. The reader gets the sense that not only will things never be clear-cut for our protagonist, but that in a place like Algeria, one never really leaves history behind. Daoud’s book is something both bigger and better than a literary polemic against Eurocentrism and Orientalism. Daoud goes out alone and meets Camus like a gunslinger on that same white-hot, blood stained beach, bringing with him all the terrible beauty of his people, and says, yes - we have something to say, too. And you and I will always be in this together.