the stranger & the mersault investigation

The Stranger by Albert Camus, translated by Matthew Ward

The Mersault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (Vintage International, 1989)

I had never read The Stranger, and was prompted to read it now as my book club had selected Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation, which is a retelling of the story from the POV of the “Arab’s” brother.  I found that book very disappointing, but I loved reading The Stranger.  It’s a short, brilliant novel about a French Algerian, whose sense of dislocation and disengagement leads him to senselessly murder an Arab man he encounters on the beach on a blazingly hot and bright summer day.  The novel begins a few days before the murder, as Mersault leaves Algiers to attend the funeral of his mother, who he has placed in a nursing home in the countryside.  His stoic acceptance of her death, and his inability to exhibit any emotional response to the loss of his mother, marks him as guilty of some nameless crime by those around him, and his apathetic coupling with, and engagement to, a beautiful and pleasant young woman also indicates his inability to feel or care about anything.

The book is brilliantly written in first person, and is riveting to read, so simple and direct and horrorful.  The Merseult Investigation, by contrast, seems like a journalist’s idea of a novel that is exercised formulaically and tediously; no attempt at characterization or narrative is made, and reading it was extremely frustrating and disappointing.