Patrick Marnham

Bringing Camus to book

The Mersault Investigation by Kamel Daoud revisits Camus’ masterpiece and provides a bitter commentary on the ongoing Franco-Algerian relationship

issue 11 July 2015

  • The Meursault Investigation

    Kamel Daoud

    One World Publications, pp. 160

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.

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