The Meursault Investigation

Kamel Daoud

Camus’s novel, The Outsider, portrayed the murder of ‘the Arab’ from the perspective of the killer, Meursault. Now, in this short novel, the reader learns who the unnamed Arab actually was through the voice of his troubled brother, Harun. Harun is an old man recounting the story of his brother’s death to an unnamed journalist in an Algerian bar. This sad story is an emotive one and I listened to Harun’s version of events with a heavy heart.

Extract

I’ve lived like a sort of ghost, observing the living as they bustle about in this big fishbowl. I’ve known the giddy feeling that comes with possessing an overwhelming secret, and that’s how I’ve walked around, with a kind of endless monologue in my head. There have certainly been moments when I had a terrible urge to shout out to the world that I was Musa’s brother and that we, Mama and I, were the only genuine heroes of that famous story, but who would have believed us? Who? What evidence could we offer? Two initials and a novel where no given name appears?

Parallels