RaveThe Guardian (UK)The Meursault Investigation is a homage to Camus written in a spirit of thwarted exasperation and badly suppressed admiration. Its author would rather not see Camus as a representative of white racism, but the case for the prosecution has to be met ... There are no illusions to be found in this wonderfully embittered, beautiful book. It is of course too late to experience nostalgia for French rule, which was vile anyway; also too late to expect anything from the clapped-out venal inheritors of independence who run Algeria, or the bigots who aim to replace them. Everywhere you look in the present there are stinking slums, bad clothes, ruined public gardens and architecturally misshapen concrete mosques. The beach on which the killing took place is paved over ... Instead of mimicking Camus’s clipped, classical French, Daoud writes in a looser and more coloured postcolonial French-Algerian argot.
Ian Buruma
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBuruma doesn’t judge his grandparents. Instead, drawing from their letters, he has given us a wholly understanding, moving account of what it meant to be Jewish and English in one of the most troubled times of the last century.
