Kamel Daoud - The Meursault Investigation

If I believe in God? Don’t make me laugh! After all the hours we’ve spent together … I don’t know why every time someone has a question about the existence of God he turns to man and waits for the answer. Ask him the question, put it directly to him ! Sometimes I have the feeling I’m really inside that minaret, and I hear them out there, determined to break down the door I’ve locked so well, howling to wake the dead for my death. There they are, just on the other side, drooling with rage. You hear that door cracking? Tell me, do you hear it? I do. It’s about to give way. And you know what I shout back at them? It’s a single sentence nobody understands: “There’s no one here! There has never been anyone! The mosque is empty, the minaret is empty. It’s emptiness itself!” And for sure, there will be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and they will greet me with cries of hate. Maybe your hero was right from the beginning: There was never any survivor in that story. Everybody died all at once, all at the same time.

Mama’s still alive today, but what’s the point? She says practically nothing. And for my part, I talk too much, I think. It’s the great shortcoming in murderers no one has punished yet, as your writer seems to have known all too well … Ah! Just one last joke, of my own invention. Do you know how “Meursault” is pronounced in Arabic? You don’t? El-Merssoul . “The envoy,” or “the messenger.” Not bad, eh? Well, right, right, this time I really must stop. The bar’s going to close, and everyone’s waiting for us to empty our glasses. To think that the sole witness of our meeting is a deaf-mute whose only pleasures are cutting up newspapers and smoking cigarettes! My God, how you love to make fun of your creatures …

Do you find my story suitable? It’s all I can offer you. It’s my word. I’m Musa’s brother or nobody’s. Just a compulsive liar you met with so you could fill up your notebooks … It’s your choice, my friend. It’s like the biography of God. Ha, ha! No one has ever met him, not even Musa, and no one knows if his story is true or not. The Arab’s the Arab, God’s God. No name, no initials. Blue overalls and blue sky. Two unknown persons on an endless beach. Which is truer? An intimate question. It’s up to you to decide. El-Merssoul! Ha, ha.

I too would wish them to be legion, my spectators, and savage in their hate.

KAMEL DAOUD is an Algerian journalist based in Oran, where he writes for the Quotidien d’Oran — the third largest French-language Algerian newspaper. His articles have appeared in Libération, Le Monde , and Courrier International , and are regularly reprinted around the world. A finalist for the Prix Goncourt, The Meursault Investigation won the Prix François Mauriac and the Prix des Cinq-Continents de la francophonie. International rights to the novel have been sold in twenty countries. A dramatic adaptation of The Meursault Investigation will be performed at the 2015 Festival d’Avignon, and a feature film is slated for release in 2017.

JOHN CULLEN is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Yasmina Khadra’s Middle East Trilogy ( The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack , and The Sirens of Baghdad ), Eduardo Sacheri’s The Secret in Their Eyes , Yasmina Reza’s Happy Are the Happy , and Chantal Thomas’s The Exchange of Princesses . He lives in upstate New York.