Bringing Camus to book

In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the work of a racist. Achebe objected to a story that used Africa as a setting for ‘the break-up of one petty European mind’, and depicted Africans as nameless savages. Achebe’s lecture — a masterpiece of special pleading, false analysis and anachronism — is now established as a founding text in the post-colonial school of criticism.

On reading the cover blurb for The Meursault Investigation, one might have the impression that in this debut novel, Kamel Daoud, a native of Oran, has carried out a similar assault on Albert Camus’s first novel, L’Etranger (translated as The Outsider). In it Camus told the story of a young Frenchman, Meursault, who killed an Arab for no good reason on the beach in his home town of Oran, and was duly executed for murder.