BEDSIDE TABLE
“I first read The Meursault Investigation by Algerian writer Kamel Daoud in 2014, and it has stayed with me. Daoud takes the nameless Algerian man pointlessly shot dead at the end of Camus’s 1942 novel, The Outsider [aka L’Étranger], gives the dead man a name and a family, and imagines what happened to them after he died. Through humanizing the dead Arab, he humanizes the Algerians during French rule.“It’s narrated by the dead man’s brother—an angry drunk in a bar. At first he doesn’t know where his brother disappeared to, he is sexually frustrated and his mother is the bane of his life. But he can’t abandon her because she has already lost a husband and a son—there’s so much love in that. They only find out his brother has died much later, and that the man who killed him, Meursault, was let off. “It’s an angry book, and the agile language makes it addictive reading. And while you might expect the novel to bash the First World, that would have been too easy. Daoud doesn’t let anyone off the hook. And yet, it’s fundamentally a human story that could have happened anywhere in the world. That interplay between the specific and the general is compelling.” —AS TOLD TO AMY FLEMING
Tamara Chalabi is co-curator of the Iraq Pavilion, Venice Biennale, May 13 to Nov. 26; LABIENNALE.ORG