AUDIO

The Meursault Investigation

by Kamel Daoud
4 CDs. 4 hrs. Brilliance. 2015. ISBN 9781511321945. $9.99. 1 MP3-CD. F
COPY ISBN
As John Gardner made Grendel a sympathetic figure in 1971, so does Daoud make the anonymous murder victim in Albert Camus's 1942 The Stranger. Harun is the narrator and the brother of the murdered Arab whose name is Musa. The novel's (originally published in Algeria in 2013) title comes from the narrator of The Stranger, the man who kills Musa on a beach and is executed for his crime. This work has Harun sitting in a bar in Oran going over the details of his brother's death and the subsequent indifference to the Arab population of Algiers during French colonization. Narrator Fajer Al-Kaisi does a fine job of performing the work with a solid sense of underlying anger throughout. It should be noted that in 2014, Daoud was threatened with execution for his negative views of Algiers in this work.
VERDICT A worthwhile purchase only if the library already owns The Stranger (ideally on audiobook). Without that background, this novel will make much less sense to the listener. ["An eye-opening, humbling read, splendid whether or not you know and love the original": LJ 6/1/15 review of the Other hc.]
Reviewed by Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI , Mar 15, 2016
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