But to be successful, a literary retelling must not simply dress up an old story in new clothes. It must also be so convincing and so satisfying that we no longer think of the original story as the truth, but rather come to question it ... In The Meursault Investigation, Daoud has done exactly this. Not only does he use an indigenous voice to retell the story of The Stranger, he offers a different account of the murder and makes Algeria more than just a setting for existential questions posed by a French novelist. For Daoud, Algeria is the existential question ... It is in this simple, direct language, ably translated from the French by John Cullen, that Daoud writes his letter of love, rebellion and despair for Algeria. It is a letter filled with doubles — a speaker and a listener, a narrator and a narrated, a murderer and a victim, an author and an icon, fanatics of the gun and fanatics of God.

The Meursault Investigation rejects the binary choice usually offered Algerians, between militarised nationalism or religious internationalism, condemning both as meaningless ... Along with the philosophy comes superlative writing, beautifully translated from the French by John Cullen. Where Camus’s vision is cold and stripped of emotion, Daoud’s is sensuous, comical and passionate ... The theatrical monologue is sometimes Beckettian, sometimes (in its self-referential intricacy and intertextuality) Borgesian, and always brilliantly metaphorical. For its incandescence, its precision of phrase and description, and its cross-cultural significance, The Meursault Investigation is an instant classic.

The genius and the limitation of Daoud’s novel lie in the directness of this engagement with Meursault/Camus ... Daoud is giving literary voice, in a language intelligible to the West—both literally, in French, and also within a familiar philosophical tradition—to a point of view that the West longs to hear but that tends to be drowned out by other voices from the Middle East ... Daoud’s voice is particularly telling for its subtlety and tolerance ... Daoud neither rejects Camus and his colonial legacy outright nor accepts his work uncritically. His resulting meditations are rich and thought-provoking, both for Algerian and for Western readers. He lets no one off the hook, including Harun himself ... That said, the book cannot be read meaningfully without The Stranger behind it: for all its vitality, the novel’s skeleton is Camus’s. Harun’s actions and meditations exist in counterpoint to Meursault’s ... By the same token, The Meursault Investigation, fascinating and important as it is, is not of itself an especially interesting work of art. Cleaving as it does to the substance of The Stranger, taking The Fall as a literary model, it too has the quality of an intellectual exercise—albeit one expertly executed and replete with significance; one that should, even must, be read for its fierce and humane intelligence.

Despite being almost satirically stylised, The Meursault Investigation, which won the Prix Goncourt in May for best first novel, is an impressive, provocative undertaking that says as much about postcolonial Algeria as it does about another writer’s motivations ... For all the detachment, a festering anger slowly seeps out, as does a controlled grasp of the absurdity of it all. This is a narrative that might not prove easy to put down, should one be intrigued enough to take it up. It is worth the gamble, because the polemic is balanced by artistic ingenuity ... The bitterness is effectively conveyed by John Cullen’s astute translation, which ensures that the direct tone is not lost. The language is plain, with few concessions to lyrical indulgence. Yet a poet’s soul lurks beneath Harun’s pain ... A relentlessly adroit blend of fire and clinical precision ensures that Kamel Daoud’s iconoclastic deliberation is about far more than a renowned novel by Albert Camus.

This is not just a clever, playful conceit. As executed by the gifted Mr. Daoud, an Algerian journalist, it provides the architecture for an intricately layered tale that not only makes us reassess Camus’s novel but also nudges us into a contemplation of Algeria’s history and current religious politics; colonialism and postcolonialism; and the ways in which language and perspective can radically alter a seemingly simple story and the social and philosophical shadows it casts backward and forward ... This monologue structure proves remarkably elastic, as Harun’s reminiscences and ruminations cut back and forth in time, looping over and around the events recounted in The Stranger. Sometimes he uses Camus’s words. Sometimes his language deliberately echoes the razor precision of Camus’s prose. Sometimes he is more lyrical and expansive.

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.

On its surface, Daoud’s book is an angry screed attacking colonial European attitudes that reduced Arabs to nameless objects. On a deeper level, it suggests that the real stranger in The Stranger is not Meursault, but the dead man on the beach ... The implied equivalence between Meursault’s crime and Harun’s, and between the moral compromises of the narrator and the possible deceit of the listener, is more than a clever literary device. It helps explain the fatwa against Kamel Daoud.

Although the novel is presented as an investigation, it’s never entirely clear whether the crime is Meursault’s murder or Camus’s book. This persistent ambiguity sets the tone of Daoud’s narrative, which plays with its original in varied and often contradictory ways, sometimes running counter to it, sometimes repeating it almost line for line. The result is at once an attack on Camus and an homage to Camus, a postcolonial novel and a parody of a postcolonial novel, an examination of the trauma of French rule and a critique of the failures of postrevolutionary Algeria — a counterpoint to The Stranger that challenges its author on his own ground, struggles with him, emulates him, and, in a final twist, looks past him.

Kamel Daoud’s novel is an ekphrastic response to Camus’ masterpiece — a dialogue of sorts with the original; a tribute, or, more likely, a rebuke. In essence, it is all and none of these, for it is a work that stands on its own while at the same time alluding both subtly and overtly to the original ... Camus’ use of language in The Stranger is minimalist — short, curt sentences that mimic Meursault’s noncommittal nature. Daoud’s language, on the other hand, is filled with longer passages and lush descriptions of the environment, perhaps signaling a deeper connection between Harun and his surroundings, an interesting use of irony considering his separateness from his own people ... a superb tale, deftly conceived and executed.

Among the book’s conceits is that The Stranger wasn’t written by Camus but by Meursault himself, a turn on the ending of that novel, in which the narrator is sentenced to die. By positioning its precursor as part of the real world, not fiction so much as testimony, Daoud moves his work into the realm of the familiar, allowing him to speak less of existential than practical, even political, concerns ... This is important, for the true subject of The Meursault Investigation is the condition of contemporary Algeria, a secular Arab state with a large Islamic culture, existing in uneasy balance in the aftermath of a shattering civil war ... It’s an inspired twist, entirely obvious in hindsight (how, after all, could one have missed it?) but also revelatory in its way. Daoud is saying that Camus’ entire posture grows out of privilege ... Were The Meursault Investigation to conclude there, it would stand as a vivid critique. The true measure of the novel, however, is that Daoud realizes critique is not enough. Critique, in this case, is just a mechanism to divide us. Critique is not as strong as complement, the investigation of everything we share.

Daoud executes this enormous task nimbly, but there is far more to his book than a clever deconstruction of a canonical novel. The Meursault Investigation is also a meditation on bereavement and a lament for the growing hold of conservative Islam on post-independence Algeria ... The Meursault Investigation, which this year won the Goncourt first novel prize, contains stories within stories, yet its narrative vitality never flags ... Despite the gravity of its concerns, Daoud’s writing maintains a wryness that makes its moments of sharp insight even more arresting. It is a testament to Daoud’s subtle, profound talent that his story works both as a novelistic response to Camus and as a highly original story in its own right. The Meursault Investigation is perhaps the most important novel to emerge out of the Middle East in recent memory, and its concerns could not be more immediate.

This kind of pulsing, heady prose draws the reader into Harun’s tale immediately. It’s a tale told in order to give the anonymous victim in Camus’s text a name—Musa—and a story of his own ... While The Meursault Investigation certainly critiques Western attitudes toward the foreign other, including those implicitly present in The Stranger, the strength of the novel, like Rhys’s, stems from its ability to stand on its own terms rather than as a gloss of the earlier work ... In giving Meursault’s victim a name, Daoud also grants him the gnarled complexities and twisted narratives that inevitably accompany agency in narrative, and in life.

Daoud invests a chatty gregariousness to his narrator who provides an exegesis of the classic novel, now described as a real-life memoir and not a book of fiction. He laments that the stark beauty of Camus/Meursault’s prose has obliterated any sense of his brother Musa ... Whereas Camus strikes a narrative of mostly short, crisp sentences, Daoud’s stand-in speaks from memory, tracing and retracing his story, adding new thoughts, details, and embellishments. Scenes slip out of order as Harun rambles back ... Daoud is smart enough not to try to mimic Camus’ style. However, the bar stool warmer’s garrulous punchiness does stop on occasion ... If there is a problem, it is Daoud’s decision, in a book filled to the brim with parallels, to substitute Camus’ anonymous Arab with historyless women.

The parallels between Meursault and him are numerous, and though the mood of Daoud’s slender novel, originally published in French in 2013, is more plaintive, it is also grudgingly respectful toward its predecessor ... Free-speech advocates may want to praise the author for his daring view on that matter, but this novel is praiseworthy enough as it stands ... Fiction with a strong moral edge, offering a Rashomon-like response to a classic novel.

As Harun meditates on guilt, alienation, and his failed affair with Meriem, a university student, his quarrel is revealed to be not just with his mother and Meursault, but with post-Independence Algeria and God himself. Ultimately, Harun identifies more with his brother’s killer than with his own zealous countrymen. The ghostlike 'double' he sees in the bar where the tale is told may be Camus himself: 'I’m his Arab. Or maybe he’s mine.' Daoud resists affirming which interpretation is 'truer,' and readers will be captivated by the ambiguity.